The Balkan Trilogy: 3, Friends and Heroes

The Balkan Trilogy: 3, Friends and Heroes (NYRB Classics, 2010)
by Olivia Manning
England, 1965

Unlike many other novels I've taken a fancy to, I spent much of The Balkan Trilogy trying to isolate what it was that made Olivia Manning's writing so appealing to me beyond the vagaries of plot.  If you'll permit a silly analogy, just what was the mystery ingredient in her page-turning curry?  Unfortunately, I have to admit I've failed.  In Friends and Heroes alone, for example, Manning displays a flair for description in her evocation of the flood-lit Parthenon as "a temple of white fire hanging upon the blackness of the sky" (675); an unexpected Flaubertian turn when Harriet Pringle and a would-be lover consider the romantic possibilities open to them during a lull in the war: "As they looked at each other, a voice said 'Love me.'  Harriet did not know whether he had spoken or whether the words had formed themselves in her mind, but there they were, hanging in the air between them, and conscious of them, they were moved and disquieted" (742); and near the end, with Greece about to fall to the Germans, even some trenchant war reporting-like insight into the fortunes of war in a scene in which we read that two English soldiers with muddy bandages on their heads are "exhausted, but it was not only that.  A smell of defeat came from them like a smell of gangrene" (884).  Although this is all fine writing in my book, I'm as aware as you that it's a major cop-out on my part to label Manning "a versatile writer" just because I was too engrossed in Friends and Heroes' plot, characterizations and its spectacle of a marriage embarked on and then deteriorating in excruciating slow motion "under the shadow of war" (692) to be able to identify the one secret weapon amidst Manning's formidable bag of tricks.  I surrender.

Olivia Manning (1908-1980)

The Balkan Trilogy: 2, The Spoilt City

The Balkan Trilogy: 2, The Spoilt City (NYRB Classics, 2010)
by Olivia Manning
England, 1962

Guy and Harriet Pringle are still trying to stick things out in WWII Bucharest for most of the dramatic second act of Olivia Manning's The Balkan Trilogy--to my mind, simultaneously a less showy but a more addictive read than its predecessor in terms of writing and plot--but the inexorability of events in The Spoilt City makes it abundantly clear that that will only be a matter of time: "Stay, and you will see a country die" warns one character with a healthy dose of gallows humor and even more predictive precision (314).  In sketching Romania's fall at the hands of first the amateur homegrown fascists and later the pros from Nazi Germany, Manning is deft at portraying the changing fortunes of major and minor characters alike as well as the futility of the situation more generally--Harriet, musing about the Drucker trial in which a wealthy and formerly well-connected Jew is imprisoned on trumped-up charges as a way for the state to rob him of his assets, here resignedly observes that "no one doubted the innocence of this friendless man, but that factor did not bear discussion.  No one could help him.  He was a victim of the times" (381).  Elsewhere, the significance of being a victim of the times is also brought home to gregarious British expat Yakimov when, on a fact-finding visit to Cluj, he hears from "an important-looking Jew" that a two-year old Romanian passport is now just "a ticket to a concentration camp" and then is told by an old German acquaintance of his that the time for westerners to flee the country is now.  Right now.  But to where?  "Europe is finished for you, of course.  North Africa will go next.  Perhaps to India.  It will be some time before we get there" (426 & 438).  The point, belabored as it may be in my telling of it, is that Manning's novel would seem to have no right to be as entertaining as it is even without the world at war momentum swing midway through The Spoilt City in which we learn that "the blitz on London has begun," "suicides were occurring daily" and German officers in Bucharest were beginning to be hailed by the locals as "these conquerors of the world" all in less than 25 pages of high adrenaline prose (467, 474 & 491).  How Manning arrived at her storytelling achievement, in that light at least, is a bit of a mystery to me.

Olivia Manning

The Balkan Trilogy: 1, The Great Fortune

The Balkan Trilogy: 1, The Great Fortune (NYRB Classics, 2010)
by Olivia Manning
England, 1960

"All I have is here," newlywed Harriet Pringle says of British expat life with her husband Guy, stateless freeloader Yakimov, and assorted displaced malcontents in faraway Bucharest, a problem since the storm clouds of what will soon become World War II are increasingly threatening the then neutral Romania with just what it means to be "a peaceful nation in someone else's war" (267 & 235).  That heavy duty geopolitical backdrop notwithstanding, I really enjoyed this first foray into Manning's The Balkan Trilogy and the first of six volumes in her Fortunes of War double trilogy.  On the most superficial level, I was pleased to discover that Manning's something of a Muriel Spark-like savage charmer on the observational front--perceptive in painting sympathetic but conflicted Harriet into something of a haves and have nots corner during an early run-in with some child beggars ("The children clung like lice.  They caught hold of her arms, their faces screwed into the classical mask of misery while they whined and whimpered in chorus" [122]) but also completely unremorseful in alluding to a poverty-stricken local dressmaker as "a tiny creature, very thin, smelling of mouldy bread.  Her face, which had one cheek full and one caught-in like a deformed apple, was dark yellow and heavily moustached" out of sheer descriptive malice elsewhere (262).  More significantly,  although somewhat related to this, I appreciated the fact that Manning's a bit of a slippery character when it comes to narrative POV.  If it wasn't always clear to me how much those sort of class-conscious sentiments were hers rather than her roman à clef characters', I'm willing to chalk that up to nuance in a novel which grapples with condescension to the Romanians on the part of the international community and the prejudice of the rich against the poor among all but one or two of the more idealistic characters regardless of nationality.  One of The Great Fortune's successes or at least one of the more ironic examples of Manning's sleight of hand, in fact, is how long the novel seems to side with the expat community in focusing on its fear about "the disintegration of their adopted world" (259) even while the disintegration of that same world has been hiding in plain sight all along for the Jews who have been hauled into jail on trumped-up charges and the poor freezing to death in bunches every time winter rolls around.  In short, a lively, fast-paced read but also "a cheap holiday in other people's misery" as some other blokes might have it.

Olivia Manning (1908-1980) in 1955