The Strange Structure of Birdsong

Recently on my blog, I asked if it was possible to write a bad novel about either of the World Wars, since the material is so heart-wrenchingly emotional that it's surely impossible to fail to engage the reader. I was thinking this while trapped in the horror of the trenches (or under them, as the tunnel-diggers of the novel are) in Birdsong, but now I've finished the book I can see one possible way to blemish a war novel: structure it like Birdsong. Everything in the book that takes place during the war is phenomenal, and the first hundred pre-war pages I could just about stomach, as they were clearly pertinent to the plot and emotions of the main character while the war is in session. On the way home from work I had to stop reading the book I was so worried that I would burst into tears at the train station, and I thought I might have to put it aside for a few weeks while I recovered. It's brutal, beautiful, and staggeringly affecting. But I cannot for the life of me imagine why Sebastian Faulks thought it would be a good idea to set about a tenth of the book in England, 1978, following a bunch of completely unlikeable tossers.

To be fair, I can understand reasons why you might want to go into the future: to juxtapose the horrors of war with the mundanity of normal life; to show how easily forgotten people's actions are after they die; to depress you completely that the heroic actions of main character Stephen Wraysford during the Great War led to the birth of a rubbish character who has no redeeming qualities whatsoever; but surely these could have been covered in five pages, rather than ten times that amount of flouncing around? The war bits of Birdsong are easily five-star material but the 1979-stuff is one star at best, and I can't fathom why Faulks would want to cheapen his novel with this tripe. It's one of those where I can see the point of what he's done, but I don't enjoy reading it. It's almost as puzzling to me as why the Arctic Monkeys included the horrible Brick by Brick on their latest album when they can write amazing songs for fun. Maybe in some way they were both done in order to make the words and songs around them more powerful and important, and if they were, they did their job.