I really enjoyed the story lines, I learned things. There is also fun, and history, and simpler times, and love and poignancy in these pages. How do kids cope during and after when their parents don’t seem able? With difficulty. How do loved ones cope? Before and after. How do soldiers and prisoners of war cope? Before and after. Fooling myself I suppose.ĭeath is, not surprisingly, with us tragically in these pages. I say colour as well as reality, because I’ve always imagined past wars, before my birth, in black and white, not in the full and changing colours of summer, autumn, winter and spring. Portland Jones has imagined war in Palestine and prisoner of war conditions in Sumatra with reality and colour. Although there is a unity of action here through the direct experiences of father and son, wife and daughter are indirectly, but, as you’d expect, no less crucially enmeshed. ‘The Holy Lands’, WA’s famous 10th Light Horse, in the first case, and Sumatra, the Pekanbaru Death Railway, in the second. WW1 and WW2 are happening around you, although as it happens in theatres of war novelists don’t often visit. Both at the time and later.Īs with Ukraine, Only Birds Above has war themes. Those who are at the front, and those close to them, however, inevitably suffer. The reality that those who never seem to suffer are those sitting in their impregnable, bomb-proof bunkers far away from the ‘theatres’ of war. With Ukraine happening all around me as I began reading Portland Jones’ second novel, Only Birds Above, just published by Fremantle Press, I went through various stages of grief – and anger.

Only Birds Above by Portland Jones