Is It Possible to Write a Bad World War Novel?

Larking around

Being halfway through Birdsong and completely immersed in the horrific world of trench warfare, I was marvelling at how brilliant the novel is when it suddenly struck me that every novel I've ever read set in one of the World Wars has been fantastic. Catch-22, The Tin Drum, and Slaughterhouse-5 are some of my favourite books of all time, and I've recently read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and The Book Thief, and the Second World War settings of both of these raise the importance and emotion of the books considerably. If you think about it, unless you went way overboard on detail, you'd have to be an extraordinarily bad writer to fail to emotionally connect a reader with characters living through these horror times. It only takes a sentence for a torrent of emotion to flood a reader's brain, endless reels of nostalgia sloshing through them, and a character would have to be an absolute dick for you to not want them to survive the Battle of the Somme or the bombing of Dresden. To engage a reader you need to connect them to the story, and who could fail to connect somebody with such wickedly important phases of history? Writing within these settings, you immediately have a backdrop that every reader in the Western world can identify with.

But is it because war novels are so easy to write that I've only read brilliant ones, or the fact that there are so many of them that the cream rises to the top and all of the boring World War books tumble quickly into obscurity? To me right now the writing in Birdsong seems magnificent, but I've never heard praise for any other Sebastian Faulkes book, so is it just that his subject matter is so enthralling that he couldn't fail to be amazing in Birdsong, and outside of this his writing isn't really that good? Perhaps I've hit on a guaranteed path to authorly success: as long as you research the era, just plonk your characters into World Wars and they will instantly become insanely likeable, tear at the reader's heartstrings, and give you a smash-hit literary classic. Maybe I'll go back and rewrite all of my short stories so that they're set in the trenches.