Birdsong and War Horse help us ignore the horrors of the present | Philip Hoare
We may still be suffering a collective shell shock from the first world war, using fiction to obscure, as much as reveal, the pastHas the first world war become a kind of eternal martial fantasy, a fictive reimagining of a lost England that never existed in the first place? With Steven Spielberg’s War Horse and the BBC’s Birdsong recently on our screens, it seems a more urgent yet oddly remote subject than ever, both anodyne and emotive as we recede from its actuality – especially in this, the first decade without a living British veteran of the trenches.
published date:Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:00:01 GMT
Birdsong and War Horse help us ignore the horrors of the present | Philip Hoare
http://www.guardian.co.uk
Birdsong and War Horse help us ignore the horrors of the present | Philip Hoare
We may still be suffering a collective shell shock from the first world war, using fiction to obscure, as much as reveal, the pastHas the first world war become a kind of eternal martial fantasy, a fictive reimagining of a lost England that never existed in the first place? With Steven Spielberg’s War Horse and the BBC’s Birdsong recently on our screens, it seems a more urgent yet oddly remote subject than ever, both anodyne and emotive as we recede from its actuality – especially in this, the first decade without a living British veteran of the trenches.