Fortunes of War: The Levant Trilogy

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Again, it’s a character study. Most of the British chaps seem much of a muchness to me, but we see a lot more of the growing problems in Guy and Harriet’s marriage, seen from Harriet’s point of view. Guy is worryingly insouciant, both for himself and Harriet, determinedly going on lecturing, running a summer school, even when there are only three students willing to turn up. Harriet, left to her own devices, has to figure out how to keep them safe, along with a Jewish student and army deserter whom they are hiding. Yes, we can do your car service on Friday. Do you want to leave your car or would you like to wait?" But hunger is there: A nightclub singer, Florica, who “…had the usual gypsy thinness and was as dark as an Indian…[was] singing there among the plump women of the audience, she was like a starved wild kitten spitting at cream-fed cats.” Beggars are everywhere: “A man on the ground, attempting to bar their way, stretched out a naked leg bone-thin, on which the skin was mottled purple and rosetted with yellow scabs. As [Harriet] stepped over it, the leg slapped the ground in rage that she should escape it.”

Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy consists of the novels: The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City and Friends and Heroes. The trilogy is a semi-autobiographical work based loosely around her own experiences as a newlywed in war torn Europe. The first book, “The Great Fortune,” begins in 1939, with Harriet Pringle going to Bucharest with her new husband, Guy. Guy Pringle has been working the English department of the University for a year and met, and married, Harriet during his summer holiday. As they travel through a Europe newly at war, one of the other characters on the train is Prince Yakimov, a once wealthy man who is now without influence or protection and who feels he is being unjustly ‘hounded’ out of one capital city after another. Harriet herself has virtually no family – her parents divorced when she was young and she was brought up by an aunt. In personality she is much less extrovert than Guy, who befriends everyone and expects to be befriended in turn. Throughout this novel I shared Harriet’s exasperation with her new husband, who constantly seems to care about everyone’s feelings, but ignores his new wife’s plight of being isolated in a new city, where she feels friendless and lonely.

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Lady Angela Hooper, a wealthy woman initially married to a nobleman. She has a nervous breakdown after her son is killed by a mortar shell. Were this just the portrait of a marriage, it would be wearisome—the Pringles finish the sequence of novels in no healthier a state than they start them. Yet the story also provides a meticulous account of war from a non-combatant’s point of view. What interests Manning, in critic Harry J. Mooney’s words, is “the chaos” that such large events “impose on private life.” Throughout, escalating fear and mayhem slowly tighten their grip around the characters, although few really understand what is happening to them. Reality is glimpsed through gossip in the English bar of the Athenee Palace (a hotel which still stands, albeit now as a Hilton), the changing tone of the news-films at the cinema, and the jokes which could be made yesterday but are perilous to tell today. The experience of exile scarred Olivia profoundly. In her trilogies it appears as a restless unease that is never far below the surface; as Deidre David observes in her book, this reflects the anxieties that preyed on her as she wrote the books during the cold war. Even more searing, though buried deeper, was the loss of her only child. In 1944, she and Reggie were delighted to find that she was pregnant. But the foetus died inside her, and she had to carry her dead baby to term. She was annoyed at the same time, seeing his willingness to have Sasha here as a symptom of spiritual flight--the flight from the undramatic responsibility of to one person which marriage was." I don't agree with David's claim that "the sense of injury for which she was criticised after the war" grew out of the privations she had endured during her wartime exile. I think it was born when her mother's love found a new focus in her son – though this did not stop Manning from loving her brother, who like her had to endure the weight of their parents' miserable marriage. He joined the RAF and was killed in action in 1941. But although she disliked her mother, Manning seemed doomed to inherit that uncontainable grudge against the world. She was tightfisted with tradesmen, and fears that England was being overrun by foreigners provoked a small-minded racism that was particularly unattractive.

This is now the third time I'm reading The Balkan Trilogy, and will then read the Levant Trilogy as well. I absolutely love this work - its myriad of characters, always complex, as we all are. Manning has really captured what it's like, I think, to be human - with love and fear and hope, each doing their best to be whatever it is that any of us need to be, and never quite sure what that is. She takes me to their world; a world that has long fascinated me - before the war and then during - and with Guy and Harriet, a woman who doubts about much, and Guy, who doubts nothing - to see the world through their eyes. Clarence Lawson, a colleague of Guy's in Bucharest. An embittered cynic and moper, he is employed by the British propaganda bureau and on relief to Polish refugees.Edwina Little, a pretty, rather empty-headed young woman who shares a Cairo flat with Dobson and the Pringles. And, oh, there’s no time for sex. Not the Pringles, certainly. A tender hand upon the other’s hand is all. And even when moved to adultery, hand upon the hotel room doorknob, well, instead, let’s have some tea. The rather boring and repetitive accounts of the British lives are offset by Yakimov’s positively dangerous adventures, which include giving the Gestapo the impression that Guy is a terrorist, and visiting his old friend Freddi, now a Gauleiter, who is not as welcoming as Yaki would like. Yaki is a great character, bringing plenty of drama and humour to the story.

Anyhow, I hope Manning was being satirical. Armies shattered, peasants starving, leaders deposed, yet the members of the British Legation feed their higher purpose by innocently reading Miss Austen. And now let’s talk about what actually impressed me about this book. I myself am Romanian. I was raised in Bucharest. Manning managed to teach me a lesson about my own city – and that I am ever grateful for. She uses actual Romanian words to paint the picture authentically; she describes the beggars and poverty I am so accustomed to, but in a way only a foreigner could; she talks about the Romanian women and men and character in a way which I can instantly recognize; most importantly, she grounds the entire story in a place that she describes in its reality, not in a fictional way in which a foreign author who’s never been there would. I was more than impressed. I could look at my own city through someone else’s eyes, and it was a beautiful experience. If Guy had for her the virtue of permanence, she might have the same virtue for him. To have one thing permanent in life as they knew it was as much as they could expect."Author Manning deftly takes the reader along for an unpredictable and dangerous ride through the distant outposts of the Balkans, as Europe swarms with turmoil. Atmosphere and character are well crafted here, with portraits of people that could only exist in that time and place. Manning has a writerly sense of conveying the terroir of a new setting, or an unfamiliar situation. Part of the charm of the story is that the reader is left to contemplate whether the war makes the man, or vice versa .. As morality shifts, somehow identity shifts as well. And the end of the 3rd book, when the noose almost closes (but not quite - they are British, after all) on the Pringles in Athens, the very last tip of Europe (and we sense how close Hitler came to having it all, indeed), is stark, dramatic and wrenching. In Egypt, Guy was "Lecturing on English literature, teaching the English language, he had been peddling the idea of empire to a country that only wanted one thing: to be rid of the British for good and all."