Fortunes of War: The Levant Trilogy

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This collection of three novels provides an extraordinary look at the individuals in the lower echelons of the British Imperial administration in the Balkan theatre during the first two years of WW II. It is a great read for those interested in this highly esoteric topic. I am afraid that most readers under the age of 70 years will be unable to appreciate its prime merits. I was able to enjoy the work because I am the right age and had earlier read "Cairo in the War 1939-45" by Artemis Cooper which describes the historical context as well as devoting great deal of space to Olivia Manning. 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. It was a pre-war marriage, the Pringle’s, which makes it sound more like portent than a save-the-date calendar event. A hurried thing, too. Don’t want to miss that war. A young English couple. He (Guy): an idealist-communist, too myopic for soldiering (and maybe just too myopic, generally); a teacher of English literature, determined to do ‘his part’ by, well, teaching English Literature. She (Harriet): an observer, really; defined, even by herself, as a wife. Yes, these are the very words she uses to describe her life. They meet, they marry. We don’t know why. Then he, almost immediately oblivious, and she, almost immediately unhappy, are off to Rumania. 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.

Although Rumania is a maize-eating country, it grows only half as much maize as Hungary. So we have here the usual vicious circle - the peasants are indolent because they're half-fed: they"re half fed because they're indolent. If the Germans do get here, believe me, they'll make these people work as they've never worked before." After being honorably discharged from duty as a lieutenant in 1977, Coonts pursued a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree at the University of Colorado, graduating in 1979. He then worked as an oil and gas lawyer for several companies, entertaining his writing interests in his free time. Like their real life counterparts, Harriet and Guy meet in July 1939 in England, marry in August and arrive in Bucharest on 3 September 1939, the day Britain declares war on Germany. Guy will work as a teacher until the Germans invade in October 1940. They will win then flee to Athens where they will stay until the spring of 1941.

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."

Better than the Balkan Trilogy, Manning writes with searing honesty about Guy and Harriet Pringle -- the thinly fictionalized version of her own marriage. Unlike the first three books that comprise the Balkan Trilogy, the focus here is almost entirely on Harriet. Especially in the middle book (the fifth of the six total books in the Fortunes of War), she is relentlessly self-examining. And, in the course of the fifth and sixth book, she learns something about herself. Simon Boulderstone, a young officer who encounters Harriet on first arriving in Egypt, and who is wounded at the Second Battle of El Alamein. When the first book opens there’s a battle campaign in full tilt. In fact there are two. One is on the grand scale and affecting more lives than can be imagined. The other is so small it’s scarcely noticed. Except by Harriet Pringle. Because while her private campaign still wearies on, it’s obvious to her as much as to the reader, that it’s already lost. Lost on the day she tossed away the idea of making her own life, met a man whose temperament is a world apart from her own, married on a whim and followed him into a series of war zones.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. This is the first in a book which introduces us to the characters and places that populate the trilogy. From ‘poor old Yaki’ who yearns constantly for a life now gone, to Guy’s boss, Professor Inchcape, to Guy’s colleague Clarence Lawson, whose company Harriet accepts when her own husband is too busy, to the scheming Sophie, who attempted to marry Guy for a British passport, to the journalists who cluster round the bars and cafes listening to rumours. For it is the phoney war and rumours abound about the possibility of the Germans invading. The English expats reassure themselves that the weather is too bad, that the Germans have other priorities, that the war will be soon be over. Meanwhile, the British Information Bureau (run by Inchcape) and the German Information Bureau delight in attempting to outdo each other with maps and window displays to create the illusion that they are winning. At this time, though, the Germans are certainly looking much stronger. As Guy throws all his time and energy into organising a play, Harriet is unable to refuse reality. At the end of this volume, Paris falls and England stands alone. The characters in Manning's first novel go from one gigantic meal to the next, from one party to another, drifting between cafes...talking, talking endlessly. The food, the plenty all around them is taken for granted. “They had been served with a goose-liver pate, dark with truffles and dressed with clarified butter. Inchcape swallowed this down in chunks, talking through it as if it were a flavourless impediment to self-expression.” As in the other novels though, it is Harriet Pringle who remains centre stage in the story. She watches Edwina’s doomed pursuit of Peter and Angela’s odd obsession with the drunken Castlebar, both married men, with concern. As always, Guy is obsessed with work – he has now also been promoted and relishes his new responsibility to run the organisation. Giving lectures, finding teachers, organising entertainment for the troops. He pays little attention to Harriet and treats her as though she is little more than a nuisance. When she becomes ill, and Guy takes a gift Angela has given her to pass on to Edwina, Harriet decides to return to England.

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.” Addictive, compulsively readable, often savagely funny, Olivia Manning’s trilogy turns Rumania and Greece and the advent of World War Two into a stage for a vast array of characters from displaced European royalty, to members of the British ex-pat community, to Rumanian antifascists. They are described with such meticulous photographic detail and I sat through so many meals listening to them pontificating, joking, gossiping, arguing that I was convinced I really had met them before, perhaps at the English Bar in Bucharest’s Athénée Palace hotel. And I was fully persuaded that I might see them again tonight or run into them in town.Because at first food is everywhere in Bucharest—and food and hunger (physical and emotional) are central motifs that run through the trilogy.

Many of the characters in earlier books also appear here, including the frivolous Edwina, Dobson, Angela Hooper, Castlebar, Aidan Pratt and the young officer, Simon Boulderstone, who was injured at the end of the last book. Guy finds his comfortable existence interrupted by news of Harriet’s death and is injured at any criticism of how he treated her. While Edwina attempts to use Harriet’s absence to integrate himself, Guy attempts to “take on” Simon. 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.” Manning ξεκινώντας με το ταξίδι ενός νεαρού νιόπαντρου ζευγαριού, του Γκάι και της Χάριετ, καταγράφει την καθημερινότητά τους, δίνοντας έμφαση στην προσωπικότητά τους. Εικόνες περνούν από τις χώρες που βρίσκονται, ξεχωρίζοντας αυτές της Ελλάδας! Το ενδιαφέρον σε αυτό το βιβλίο είναι ότι βασίζεται στην ζωή της συγγραφέα, καθώς πολλά γεγονότα που αναφέρονται έχουν λάβει χώρα στην πραγματική ζωή της Manning. Ένα βιβλίο που αγάπησα καθώς ανήκω στους αναγνώστες που δεν δίνει τόσο έμφαση στην πλοκή αλλά στους χαρακτήρες και σε αυτή τη τριλογία η συγγραφέας σκιαγραφεί αριστοτεχνικά όλους τους ήρωές της από τους πρωταγωνιστές μέχρι τους δευτερεύοντες. Θα ενθαρρύνω τους αναγνώστες που αγαπούν το στοιχείο αυτό να το διαβάσουν, ενώ όσοι επιθυμούν δράση να μην έχουν μεγάλες προσδοκίες. Refugees crop up again and again in this book. In a passage that will strike a chord with many displaced Ukrainians (and departing anti-Putin Russians too), we meet a dispossessed and distraught baron from Bessarabia who is now a changed man: “I have lost everything. But everything! My estate, my house … my silver, my Meissen ornaments. … You cannot imagine, so much I have lost.” He breaks down in tears: “I have even lost my little dog.” 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."Sadly, with Fortunes of War, casting works against the film. Where Guy Pringle is a big bear of a man in the novels, Branagh's sensitive Guy just isn't the same character. And where Harriet Pringle is a small and at times frail woman in the novels, Thompson's Harriet is, well, Emma Thompson. This is not a small matter. The novels' point of view is that of Harriet and what we get there is a detailed, personal, even intimate view of the Pringles' marriage. If you read these novels all in a rush, you almost become Harriet Pringle for a time, immersed in the details of her marriage, seeing the world through her eyes. There's a toughness to Harriet, but also vulnerability, something that Guy often misses as he plunges into one project after another. Little of this comes through in the film.