Fortunes of War: The Levant Trilogy

Product Information

The book opens on the Orient Express as Guy Pringle and his bride, Harriet, head for Bucharest. They have been married barely a week and have known each other for hardly more than a fortnight; this wartime marriage of strangers is the central mystery of the novels: “She could only wonder at the complexity of the apparently simple creature she had married.” Guy, a leftist, is interested in ideas, intensely sociable, generous to a fault; he collects new people with an avid yet somehow impersonal hunger. His Marxism is the substitute for a deep religious urge and, perhaps impelled by his beliefs, Guy becomes a one-man safety net for his many hangers-on in Bucharest. than a house in Macedonia.”Semi-sprawling novelized memoir of Brits circulating through the occupations and evacuations of the world war in Rumania and Greece. 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. 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.

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. 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.

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." And yet, watching him as he sat there, unsuspecting of criticism or boredom, an open-handed man of infinite good nature, her heart was touched. reflecting on the process of involvement and disenchantment which was marriage, she thought that one entered it unsuspecting and, unsuspecting, found one was trapped in it." 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. Because at first food is everywhere in Bucharest—and food and hunger (physical and emotional) are central motifs that run through the trilogy.

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. Two years on, the settings of the second trilogy have changed with the progress of Harriet’s war. But the themes are constant wherever she pitches up: her husband’s complete se As the garage door opened, however, through the pouring rain, I could see that the yard waste bin had already been emptied by the local government sub-contracted service.

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. 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’m sure some of the story here was meant to be satirical, but I’m not sure even Manning knew how much. Because I was left with this: Why were they there? What need for an English teacher, his wife and cohorts, soap-opera-ish friends and enemies . . . in Rumania, first, and then, when that country was overrun, in Greece, and then boarding the last boat to Egypt? Marry in haste, repent at leisure." I forget the origin of that quote, (was it Shakespeare?), but it's an apt description of the three books that make up "The Balkan Trilogy". I reviewed the first 2 books separately when I read them, so this is more of an overview of the three parts.

The metaphorical war between the sexes is amplified by the nonmetaphorical war raging all around. . . . It was Manning’s ability to paint the complex relationship between gender and power with wit and sensitivity in her wartime novels that makes her an important 20th century writer.”Friends and Allies" finds Guy and Harriet in Athens, where they fled after the fall of Rumania into Nazi hands. The two were married after a very brief wartime courtship, and at first Harriet adores Guy and finds him fascinating and brilliant. It doesn't take long for her to realize his shortcomings, mainly his selfishness and self-centeredness regarding anything but his "work". This book finds her contemplating the wisdom of her marriage as she realizes that Guy is unlikely to change. So this is the rich setting into which the jewel of Manning's epic story of marriage, class, war, masculinity, manners (so many things!) is placed. The first book, as I've said, is almost unputdownable.