Better than Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. That’s what the cover says. Anyone who has read the former, then, will have high hopes for this book which are, unfortunately, largely unrealised.

Even the blurb on the back in misleading, claiming that this is a book about the love of a goatherd and his intended partner, and of the misfortunes of war and the damage it causes to a tight-knit community, but after taking the reader down an attractive path in which he makes you a fully-fledged member of the realistic community he describes, he seemingly loses interest and decides instead to reproduce what looks like research notes he considers too valuable to leave out of the book in their virgin state. The tone and style changes, and the reader is left feeling that they have been tricked into reading something to which they never signed up.

Anyone for whom this is their first De Berniers book will likely wonder at the clamour over Corelli, and may well be put off visiting what many consider to be their favourite book of all time.

A more up-front admission that this volume is part unfinished story, and part dry history lecture that can be skipped wholesale without spoiling the flow of the narrative (indeed dropping the Mustafa Kemal pages - those in question - would actually improve the experience no end) would be much appreciated and avoid disappointment.

So where does De Berniers fail to deliver?

First, it is in setting up such a wonderfully constructed and complex mesh of relationships among the inhabitants of his fictional village, and then never introducing conflict between them. Greeks and Turks, Muslims and Christians all live together, all relying on each other for help, survival and happiness as war looms. The reader can see how this would tear the community apart when it all flares up, but there is no internal conflict. The Greek mistress who must pretend that she is Muslim to stay with her husband is never found out. The mad man they call dog who lives up in the hills never causes harm or trouble and has only one key line in the whole book - a line that could so easily have been said by any other character.

The two main characters, the boys who are the title’s ‘birds’ without wings, are sent in opposite directions by the outbreak of war, but while one tells us of his experiences long after the event through a series of reminiscences, the other is largely forgotten until a short scene close to the end when he returns to the village.

We are never really told the significance of the woman who was said to have poisoned many in the village, later found to have been innocent, whose exhumation was such a focus of the earliest pages of the story.

By leaving so many loose ends, and delivering upon the reader a story they had never agreed to read - the history of the founding fathers of the modern Turkish state - De Berniers latest book is ultimately disappointing, and one which you leave feeling less than fulfilled.

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