If you're looking for a Great War novel, this one might tickle your fancy, but it's a bit of an anti-climax to a quartet of novels that are, in other places, charming, witty, smart, and interesting. This, by contrast, is a fairly standard, livened up only by Dominic's odd position as an Australian serving for the British. Australia famously became a nation at Gallipoli, and this novel is a bit of a symbolic version of that nationification. But it lacks the romance of earlier books (sex, yes; romance, less so), and the cleverness (the narrator is entirely effaced here), and the wit. ( )

When Blackbirds Sing is the last installment in the Langton quartet. We rejoin Dominic as he journeys back to war, re-enlisting at the start of World War I. Leaving his wife in Australia to tend to their sheep farm he heads back to England and reconnects with an old flame, Sylvia.
After killing a man and witnessing the atrocities of war Dominic has sobered of all immoral actions and indiscretions. He returns home to Australia a changed man inside and out.
I can honestly say I enjoyed this book much more than the last three (none of which I completely finished). Still, everything about Boyd's quartet was old and stuffy. The series is supposed to depict the early 1900s but the writing seems older and more staid than that. ( )