Martin Boyd (1893–1972)

The best of the Langton Quartet, largely because it sidelines the terribly romantic, terribly serious, terribly dull Dominic and looks instead at the fascinating, charming, slightly sad Langton relatives. Funny, wise, sad, nicely written. This is as close as Boyd comes to being the Australian Anthony Powell (which is meant as praise, though some might dissent).

Stumbles a bit at the start, but the conceit--our narrator is convinced to tell the story of his family as mediated by his grandmother's diaries--is a very nice one, and once we get into the family story, the awkward flaws fall away. Then you're left with Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead style), or the early volumes of Powell's 'Dance to the Music of Time,' only in Australia.

"Austin understood much better le plaisir aristocratique which consists not as his guest had imagined in rudeness to someone show more whom it is safe to snub, but in a confidence so complete in one's own values that one affirms them clearly, indifferent to the fact that they are incompatible with the ideas of a bourgeois society, and the pleasure consists in seeing the bewilderment of a conventional mind, when faced with an idea too generous, or a taste too eclectic or even an honesty too obvious for its comprehension." show less

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; show more romance, less so), and the cleverness (the narrator is entirely effaced here), and the wit. show less

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 show more 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. show less