It is also the last in the author's "Langton Tetralogy" (which comprises The Cardboard Crown, A Difficult Young Man, Outbreak of Love and When Blackbirds Sing).

[1] During World War I Dominic Langton leaves his wife and child behind in Australia and travels to England to enlist in the army.

While there he comes to know his English family roots for the first time and is initially seduced by the show of class and privilege.

Maurice Dunlevy, in a re-examination of the whole tetralogy after it had been re-issued in 1971 by Lansdowne Press, wrote: "Throughout his career Boyd had been wrestling with the conflict between writing a family saga in a form that might be called a schematic fable — the Jamesian novel of total relevance.

"[2] Reviewing the 2014 release from Text in Southerly Shaun Bell notes: "Difficult to define in terms of genre and uneasily placed in canonical formations, the expected and characteristic nostalgia in Boyd’s treatment of a belated anglo-Australianism aligned with British colonialism is curiously absent.