Fortunes of War: The Levant Trilogy

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A tour de force . . .a picture of the Middle East in wartime that we shall want to look at again and again.” Discerning Northern Irish actor Kenneth Branagh and the beautiful, brilliant Emma Thompson met and presumably fell in love here, as they play bohemian British newlyweds Guy and Harriet Pringle who arrive in Bucharest, as does the slothful, flat broke Prince Yakimov, who takes up an ad hoc job as a photojournalist of sorts on a British paper to save himself from total indigence. Harriet is introduced to her fellow expatriates, but their happy life is disjoined by the assassination of Romania's prime minister and Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland. Gossip murmurs of a German invasion of Romania and Guy, mentally consumed all the same in his work and arranging civil occasions, is gaulled by his Communism (no pun intended) to take peripheral measures to take care of the family of a Jewish student of his from the anti-Semitic Romanian regime. Although this premise sounds as if it gains momentum and grows more and more exciting, it decidedly does not. those who give too much are always expected to give more, and blamed when they reach the point of refusal"

She had once been ambitious for Guy, but saw now the truth of the proverb that the children of darkness were wiser than the children of light. Guy, with all his charity, would probably remain ore or less where he had started." A united Rumania - a Rumania, that is, who'd won the loyalty of her minorities by treating them fairly - could have stood up to Hungarian demands. She might even have stood up to Russia. If she'd remained firm, Yugoslavia and Greece would have joined with her; perhaps Bulgaria too. A Balkan entente ! Not much perhaps, but not to be sneezed at. With the country solid, enjoying a reasonable internal policy, the Iron Guard could never have regained itself. It could never have risen to power in this way." It is fair to say that Guy Pringle is one of the most frustrating characters in any novel and his arrival, as expected, does not improve Harriet’s life noticeably. Politically naïve, emotionally warm and gregarious; Guy spends his time thinking the best of everyone despite the reality of his situation and unwilling to face reality. Guy had worked in the English department of the University in Bucharest, but, once in Greece, he finds that Dubedat, Lush and Professor Pinkrose are unwilling to help Guy with work – as he once helped them. Harriet is constantly frustrated by her husband’s unwillingness to see anything but the best about everyone and begins to feel more and more neglected as these books continue. Indeed, this novel sees her attracted to Charles Warden, as she feels her marriage means little to Guy, who has time for everyone but her, in a life taken up by providing entertainment for the troops and pouring his attention on students and friends. Dubedat, an English elementary school teacher and bohemian pacifist 'simple lifer', who was hitchhiking his way around the Balkans when war broke out. Working class and a scouser.I think Harriet Pringle is the greater character: wise and helpful for newly married young soldier Simon Boulderstone, freshly arrived from England; she is the one who counsels Guy to be diplomatic when he is trying to negotiate a job with the odious Gracey; the one who sees Edwina Little for the beautiful, sweet but shallow girl she is; the one who befriends Lady Angela Cooper, not her type at all; the one who accurately reads the feelings and emotions of those around her. David never hides these flaws, and does her best to persuade us that Manning was a great novelist. She deconstructs the novels to their author's skills and preoccupations, and shows how her fiction is put together. This is a worthwhile exercise, although it has the built-in danger of diminishing the books it seeks to celebrate. I was not seized by an urgent desire to read The Doves of Venus, The Play Room or The Rainforest. Despite the research and sensitivity that David brings to the study of such novels, I cannot help thinking that their plots sound thin and watery compared to the trilogies.

Many of the poets out here are refugees: all are exiles,” she wrote in Egypt, one of her temporary homes. “That sense of a missed experience, that no alternative experience can dispel, haunts most of us.” Meanwhile, those recently uprooted by the Ukrainian war (I count myself among them) who have escaped the worst that war can throw at them—the destruction of home, health, the loss of limbs, family or friends—may take cold comfort from a moment of unaccustomed optimism from Manning in book four. To a friend bemoaning the loss of a glittering career the war has perhaps permanently truncated, Harriet replies philosophically: “We’re all displaced persons these days. Guy and I have accumulated more memories of loss and flight in two years than we could in a whole lifetime of peace. And, as you say, it’s not over yet. But we’re seeing the world. We might as well try and enjoy it.”

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Partly based on Olivia Manning's own experiences during World War II, The Balkan Trilogy is the first part of a set of trilogies (the second being The Levant Trilogy). Harriet Pringle and her husband, Guy, (recently and hurriedly married due to the war) live in Bucharest as King Carol II tries to keep Romania free of the war. The first two volumes of the trilogy follow their lives as British expatriates trying to belong in an foreign land. The third volume follows the Pringles to Greece after they are forced to evacuate Bucharest. Despite the danger and violence surrounding them, their marriage does not exactly grow stronger - Harriet discovers just how little she knew about Guy before they married, and struggles with the reality of living in a dangerous time while her husband fills his time with projects that do not include Harriet. Their relationship is tried time and again by the rumors that surround their marriage as well as Harriet's friendships with other men (and Guy's friendships with other women). The heart of the display was a rosy bouquet of roasts, chops, steaks and fillets frilled round with a froth of cauliflowers. Heaped extravagantly about the centre were aubergines as big as melons, baskets of artichokes, small coral carrots, mushrooms, mountain raspberries, apricots, peaches, apples and grapes.” She does the same thing with Guy's Marxist pronouncements. She neither condemns nor endorses them. But you know Harriet must have some opinion. The novels describe the experiences of a young married couple, Harriet and Guy Pringle, early in World War II. A lecturer and passionate Communist, Guy is attached to a British Council educational establishment in Bucharest ( Romania) when war breaks out, and the couple are forced to leave the country, passing through Athens and ending up in Cairo, Egypt. Harriet is persuaded to return home by ship, but changes her mind at the last minute and goes to Damascus with friends. Guy, hearing that the ship has been torpedoed, for a time believes her to be dead, but they are eventually reunited.