Somme particularly brutal. According to scholar Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż, Faulks treats the war as a way to "test human endurance" and explore the effect of carnage on the psyche. A reviewer for Kirkus Reviews also highlighted this theme, writing that "the war, here, is Faulks's real subject, his stories of destroyed lives, however wrenching, only throwing its horror into greater relief and making it the more unbearable". The contemporary historian Simon Wessley describes the novel, alongside Barker's Regeneration, as an exemplar of contemporary fiction which uses the experience of the World War I trenches to examine more contemporary understandings of PTSD. De Groot argues that this reinvestigation of a traumatic history mirrors a growing interest among both literary authors and historians in trauma as a thematic subject. The historian Ross J. Wilson noted that this reinvestigation of the traumas of the World Wars revisits and revives the experience of trauma within contemporary culture. Faulks uses both different narrators and different narrative perspectives (first, third and omniscient) on the death in the trenches to explore the trauma of death in numerous and challenging ways. For Mullen, this gives the effect of "[t]he novelist painfully manipulat[ing] the reader's emotions." Style The novel frequently changes narrative perspectives, using a significant amount of interior monologue, direct speech and dramatic irony. Though employing an omniscient narrator who occasionally describes the events from a broad perspective, the novel tends to shadow a handful of characters closely, principally Stephen Wraysford, Isabelle Azair, Michael Weir, Jack Firebrace and Elizabeth Benson. Pat Wheeler, a scholar of literature, describes the narrative style as "both naturalistic and realistic and very much in the manner of the nineteenth century writers [Faulks] cites as literary influences"—Wheeler notes Émile Zola, Charles Dickens and George Gissing among these. Wheeler emphasizes that the naturalistic tendencies of the narrative allow treatment of the war setting without an idealization of the "human" parts of the narrative. Consistently, reviews emphasize the novel's imagery of the battle experience in and amongst the trenches. For Slade, the novel "produces a vivid and traumatizing description of the sights and sounds of life and death in (and under the trenches)"; the principal cause of this, he says, is "the pure fury and intensity of the imagery created page after page". Reception Birdsong is one of Faulks's best-received works of fiction, both by the public and amongst reviewers. The British press offered considerable praise, with