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The Balkan Trilogy (1981)

The Levant Trilogy (1982)

By Olivia Manning

Review by Paul Lenz

The other night I stumbled over Fortunes of War being re-broadcast on BBC4 was immediately reminded of why I loved it so much the first time it was shown. Kenneth Branagh is perfection (but then he is pretty much a modern-day Guy Pringle). Emma Thompson plays the same character she always plays, but it actually works here. The supporting cast is stellar – Ronald Pickup, Robert Stevens, Rupert Graves, Alan Bennett. Whilst some might argue for Brideshead or GBH to my mind it was the best British drama series of the 1980’s. But hang on, isn’t this meant to be a book review? Indeed it is and what truly makes Fortunes of War great is the quality of its source material.

Olivia Manning was born in 1908 (yes, Wikipedia has the wrong date!) in Portsmouth. Half Irish on her mother's side, she was the daughter of a Naval officer of small means.. She studied at Portsmouth Art College before moving to London and working as a furniture painter in Peter Jones department as she strove to establish herself as a writer. She was later to become an ambulance driver despite never having passed her driving test.

Her first novel, The Wind Changes, was published in 1937. The novel is set in Dublin of 1922 and concerns a group of Catholics awaiting the return of their leader against a background of suspicion and betrayal and it was clearly influenced by her Irish heritage. It was not a great success, and the outbreak of the Seconnd World War meant that she was not to publish another book for ten years.

In 1939 she married Reggie Smith – then an English council lecturer, later a BBC producer and almost certainly a spy despite being a self-proclaimed communist.

At the outbreak of the Second World War they travelled to Bucharest and mixed with the émigré flotsam and jetsam in the months before the Iron Guard seized control in Romania. Moving to Athens and later Egypt they finally ended up in Jerusalem where Reggie became head of the Palestine Broadcasting Station. It was these years spent one step ahead of the Nazi war machine with a literary obsessed husband that were to provide material for her finest work.

The Balkan Trilogy (1981) (The Great Fortune, 1960; The Spoilt City, 1962; Friends and Heroes, 1965) follows the fortunes of Guy Pringle, a British Council lecturer and his wife Harriet from Bucharest to Athens. The are surrounded by a crowd of beautifully observed minor characters, the stand out amongst them Prince Yakimov, a White Russian on his uppers who always wears a coat the late Tsar gave his father. Guy is generous to a fault, forever taking people under his wing and always with a theatrical project on the go. Harriet strives to protect Guy from the risks his openness and naïveté engender - the parallels with Olivia and Reggie are clear, the protagonists being only slightly exaggerated versions of Manning and her husband.

The Levant Trilogy (1982) (The Danger Tree, 1977; The Battle Lost and Won, 1978; The Sum of Things, 1980) finds Guy in Harriet in Egypt, and introduces a host of new characters, including the youthful officer Simon Balderstone, who participates in a wonderfully realised account of the battle of Alamein.

Some critics have criticised Manning on the grounds that she produced little more that reportage, however I believe this does her a considerable injustice. Whilst there is a factual basis to many of the events and characters she describes it takes an exceptional creativity to turn this inspiration into fully formed characters who, despite their eccentricity, are utterly believable. The quality of her writing is superb throughout, and it is an immense shame that she never attainted the level of critical acclaimed achieved by peers like Iris Murdoch and Beryl Bainbridge. Manning died in 1980 and so did not even live to see the resurgence of interest in her work after the success of Fortunes of War.

Manning wrote another five novels, of which School for Love (1951) is perhaps the best. It tells the story of a young orphaned boy, Felix, who is lodged in war-torn Jerusalem with the fantastically monstrous Miss Bohun. As he seeks affection and attempts to come to terms with events and characters that surround him, Felix is forced to mature rapidly - an entrancing book and a good introduction to Manning’s work.
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