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".
