It is difficult to know whether Clive Aslet intended a comparison between his debut novel, The Birdcage, set in Salonica during the first world war, and Sebastian Faulks’s similarly titled Birdsong. Whilst Faulks’s novel sits comfortably within the generally accepted narrative that the first world war was an unmitigated disaster, with lion-like Tommies led by donkey-like officers, Aslet has written what is effectively a panegyric to the officer class. Indeed, so casually heroic is every officer in the book it is almost as though Richard Attenborough’s version of Oh! What a Lovely War never existed.
The Birdcage begins with the almost Wodehouse-inspired scene of the first ascent in a balloon of Lieutenant Winnington-Smith, a failed aeroplane pilot and now an official war artist. Like every character in the book, Winnington-Smith has a nickname, ‘Winner’, and on his balloon flight to draw the enemy lines for his proposed painting he is accompanied by Captain Southall, or ‘Sunny’, commander of the Balloon Section.
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