A Better Place, is a relentless, ghastly depiction of warfare: “Have you ever seen what a grenade can do to someone? What they reveal?” Young boys constantly witnessing the gruesome deaths of their colleagues, affecting an immunity to the nightmare none of them owned: “It was best to wash the blood off as soon as you could. It gummed up the working parts of your rifle.” The story is mainly that of Roy Mitchell, who on top of the horrors, becomes burdened by guilt when he abandons his brother, Tony.

Roy and Tony are identical twins, almost: “‘Do you think we held hands as we swam together in our mother’s womb?’” – Roy “looked like he wanted to be sick”. Roy thinks Tony is touched like their father, who had never been the same after returning from the First World War. He was a broken man, an embarrassment: “The coward father who could not speak without weeping.” Their mother left once the boys were teenagers.

The brothers were managing well after she left: “All right those Mitchell boys. Quick learners and cheerful when the going got tough”. Then in 1940, when the boys were nineteen, they were signed up to the New Zealand Infantry Brigade, 22^nd Battalion, to go and fight in their own world war.

In Crete, Roy and Tony are both sent to man a forward listening post – they shouldn’t have been together, but Manny Jones had been arrested and Tony took his place. Manny is a character many readers would happily see joining the list of the fallen, he is a disgusting man who features in the story to show the insanely low levels men are reduced to in war – and perhaps for the telling of his one heroic deed, and the story of one who perversely pays him respect and holds his hand at the end.

A Better Place is full of  perversity: leaders not able to lead, those of lower rank who find themselves suddenly having to take charge: “C’mon boss, we got no choice here.” There are the completely mad, the temporarily insane, and the many who have been there before and can’t wait to get back where they would be able to  “feel their hearts beating at the ends of their fingertips again.”

Roy’s guilt is due to his running away from the listening post when Tony’s foot is blown off – not only guilt of the act, but of knowing Tony would never have abandoned him. Roy does go back and bury the foot, but by then Tony is gone, presumed dead. Roy’s guilt is just part of the mess he and his mates are in; they are being killed, and they are killing. Death and agony are indiscriminate, all types, both sides: “The devastation a human body suffers when a tank runs over it is quite horrific.”

The Kiwis are as bad as the Aussies, as bad as the Yanks, as bad as the Germans. Stealing from the people they were supposed to be helping, beating and raping them: “many of them had come to enjoy the savagery they had been licensed”. There are no differences in the kindnesses or the cruelties of the various groups, the only difference noted is that between the quality of their toilet paper.

The reader follows Roy from Crete to Egypt, then Sicily, Italy, where a beautiful historic village is bombed out of existence, along with some of the inhabitants and some of the troops. The reader follows another journey, of prisoners of war being transported to Upper Silesia. The unrelenting heat of Egypt, where the Kiwis talk of John A. Lee, and have differing opinions on politics, on land ownership, is contrasted with the unrelenting cold of Silesia, where a German Marxist helps the prisoners stay sane.

One of the prisoners has talent and a love of art that allows him some perspective: “He nodded towards Bell on the left. ‘Guernica is sitting beside me.’” The prisoner remembers his childhood, the friends he’s left in his Battalion, especially David Brookes, the one Manny called Sister. Roy Mitchell would meet David again many years later in Auckland, a meeting that could redeem him, but which just sends him back to his lonely farm – where the reader first meets him as a 78-year-old unmarried shepherd.  

A Better Place is a beautifully written book about the ugliest of things. As well as the harrowing scenes of war, there are mesmerising sequences such as Roy working his way back to the land he has been allocated by the government. Land in the “cold, high country of the Central North Island”. Land adjacent to the farm he grew up on, which had been given to his father in the same manner: “Tony had said once that it was the best land anyway. Because nobody else wanted it.” The book is about war stealing not just the lives of the dead, but also of some who survive, and those around them.

A Better Place is a tough read; the reader can’t help but consider the plight of the young soldiers being forced to commit atrocities in Ukraine and in Gaza, and elsewhere where sanity has lost its grip – can’t help but wish they were all in a Better Place.