Balkan trilogy

“Heroes came and went these days. When they were gone, it seemed they were gone forever.” (Olivia Manning, Friends and Heroes)

/ madamebibilophile / 10 Comments

Earlier this year Marcie and I decided to buddy read Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy, with The Great Fortune (1960) in June, The Spoilt City (1962) in August, and finishing with Friends and Heroes (1965) in October. I’ve just managed to get the final volume read in time!

At the start of the novel, Harriet Pringle has left behind war-torn Bucharest and made it to Athens. She is anxiously waiting for her husband Guy to join her:

“She glanced about her, bewildered by her safety, unable to believe in a city so becalmed in security and comfort. Her nerves reacted still to the confusion of their last months in Romania.”

Guy does manage to escape and reach her, but as his work arrangements with the British Council were for Cairo, he finds himself somewhat adrift, compounded by old adversaries Lush and Dubedat conspiring to keep their positions of minor power in education, and Guy well away from it all. For relentless extrovert Guy, this is challenging:

“Throwing himself into one occupation or another, he had managed to keep anxiety on the periphery of consciousness; now, without employment, without friends, without money, he was trying to follow his old escape pattern. But there was no route open to him.”

The faultlines always so apparent in the Pringles’ marriage start to become real cracks in Friends and Heroes. Harriet needs intimacy and to be prioritised, Guy is not uncaring but he is entirely unable to provide either of these things:

“He loved her, but his love must be taken for granted. If she put it to the proof according to her needs, she found herself sacrificed to what he saw as a more important need: his need to be free to do what he wanted to do.”

Guy is also not so generous that he values other people for their differences. Alan Frenwen is a sweet, socially awkward man, who loves Greece and his little dog Diocletian. Guy disregards him as he cannot provide the political echo chamber and admiration Guy needs. Instead, he has an intense friendship with the generally unpleasant Ben Phipps, because they can slap each other on the back regarding their shared communist beliefs.

Manning is very good at portraying unlikeable characters. Three books in and I’m still not especially keen on either Guy or Harriet, or their circle. Yet they are so recognisable and believable, young and out of their depth personally and politically.

“This was a world in which only the ignorant could be happy.”

Even my favourite character, Prince Yaki, remains thoroughly reprehensible, forever sponging off people. Except he has finally sold his Hispano-Suiza and so for once has money:

“In funds, he had no need of friends. When he could buy his own food, he ate well and ate alone.”

Terrible! Yet at times he is a good friend to Harriet, and I do find him irrepressible despite his constant proclamations of being “poor Yaki”.

We spend time with this community as they wait to see if Greece will be pulled into the war, wondering if they should leave, and if so, where to go. The tension builds as the situation worsens in world politics and in the Pringle’s marriage; the first leading to soldiers swamping the city and a handsome one of these named Charles Warden threatening the second.

I had a sense in Friends and Heroes of Manning really growing in accomplishment as a writer. The interweaving of the Pringles marriage portrait alongside vivid descriptions of Greece and the growing threat of invasion is finely balanced. The characterisation of well-established figures becomes more complex, and there are two scenes in particular of true sadness, highlighting the human destruction both physically and spiritually during war.

“Pale and unhappy, he returned to his books, wanting to hear no more. Harriet pitied his disillusionment, but had no patience with it. Reality was not to be altered by an inability to recognise fact.”

Friends and Heroes builds to a long, tense final chapter as the Pringles try and decide how severe the threat is to them if they stay, and if they want to evacuate to Egypt how on earth they will even manage it. I thought it was brilliantly done and the Levant trilogy is absolutely on my 2027 reading list!

(I can see on Goodreads that some readers found the Balkan trilogy too long, which makes me think it is best to continue with spacing the books out a bit. Reading as Marcie suggested in alternate months meant I didn’t find them overlong at all. So now I just need to work out which months will be Levant months…)

“War was the time when mediocrities came to the top and better men must rot or die in the conflict.”

To end, of course Bowie, but I thought I’d be marginally less predictable and choose Seu Jorge’s version:

“Here they were, wrecked together on the edge of Europe as on an island and she was learning to keep her thoughts to herself.” (The Spoilt City, Olivia Manning)

/ madamebibilophile / 15 Comments

It was a conversation with Marcie in the comments of Jacqui’s Levant Trilogy post which led to us doing a buddy read for all three volumes of Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy this year. We started with The Great Fortune (1960) in June, and now onto the second instalment, The Spoilt City (1962).

It took me a while to get into The Great Fortune, but by the end I was whizzing through and couldn’t wait to start The Spoilt City. I’m clearly in the rhythm of Manning’s writing now because I sank right in and absolutely loved this second volume.

(What I decided I didn’t love was the omnibus edition I started with, so I’ve bought these Windmill Editions now and I’m much happier).

The city is Bucharest in 1940, and we follow still-fairly-recently married Guy and Harriet Pringle as the physical and social environment they are used to disintegrates around them.

“On the pavement the Guardist youths with their banners and pamphlets, were still trying to rouse revolt. Although a sense of revolt agitated the nerves like an electric storm that would not break, the city was lethargic, the palace dormant, its white blinds drawn down against the tedium of the afternoon.”

This volume is increasingly tense, the Nazi threat growing ever-closer. Guy is still teaching English at the university, but both students and the staff group are rapidly dwindling.

“With uncomplaining enthusiasm, Guy did much more than was expected of him; but he was not imposed upon. He did what he wanted to do and did it, Harriet believed, to keep reality at bay.”

Guy’s boss Inchcape is also determined to keep the Department open, even as dangers grow. This volume is more emotionally affecting than the first, I found this particularly true in a scene with the older single women of the department being forced to leave for their own safety, as well as Inchcape having to face his vulnerabilities to a shocking extent.

This forms the shifting and stressful background to the Pringles’ early marriage. Both Harriet and Guy have to acknowledge their profound differences in how they approach life and see things:

“It was probably significant that he was physically short-sighted. He could not recognise people until almost upon them. Their faces were like so many buns. good-natured buns, he would have said, but Harriet did not agree. She saw them in detail and did not like them any the better for it.”

“He saw her muddled and lost in anarchy and a childish mysticism.”

Guy’s belief in communism gives him more certainty, a grounding as the ground constantly shifts beneath them. Still, their marriage seems underpinned by a great deal of love for each other, although the reader is not privy to any declarations.

My favourite character Yakimov is still racketing around, trying to sell his beloved Hispano-Suiza car even as no-one has money for fuel. He is still living with the Pringles and Harriet despairs.

“If she wanted to get rid of him, she would have to pack his bags herself and lock him out. And if she did that, he would probably sit on the doorstep until Guy brought him back in again.”

Yaki behaves appallingly in the first part of the novel, before redeeming himself beautifully at the end, making his portrayal one of the most comedic, disturbing and complex in The Spoilt City. Apparently based on Julian Maclaren-Ross, I really should learn more about this Fitzrovian dandy poet. Anthony Powell based X Trapnel on him in A Dance to the Music of Time, and he certainly seems a character…

What struck me most in this volume, apart from the evocation of physically crumbling environs, was the ambivalence, or perhaps resignation, of most of the people Harriet interacts with. As long as they are safe and their lives continue in a way that works for them, they don’t seem to particularly care who is in charge. This made me realise the oppositional Second World War narratives I’ve taken for granted until now; I am used to films and books where people are firmly on the side of the Allies or the Axis powers, not indifferent between the two.

This is brought into sharp focus by Harriet’s English friend, Bella:

“Her skin apricot, her hair bleached by the sun, Bella was looking extremely handsome and seemed almost intoxicated by the night’s happenings.

‘How wonderful to have a strong man in power!’ she said. ‘Everyone is saying that Romania will regain her territory.’

‘What makes them think that?’

‘Because Antonescu is a real dictator. He knows how to deal with Hitler and Musso. He’s one of them. I don’t mind betting, within three months, this country will be on its feet again.’”

Later they meet again, Bella delighting in all she can buy as prices tumble, when they run into each other under a newly erected swastika flag:

“Elated by her rising fortune, she looked up and smiled at the flag and the clear pale sky beyond it. ‘I love this time of year,’ she said. ‘so delicious after the fug of summer. It makes one feel so alive.’

She seemed aglitter with life, almost dancing in her new green lizard skin shoes.”

Astonishingly, it is only Guy who overtly acknowledges what is behind the flag, the only one who says “I couldn’t stand it. I kept thinking of the concentration camps.”

Manning leaves spaces in her narrative so we assume Harriet is of a similar mind, although her primary worry is for the safety of Guy, vulnerable under the new regime because of his communist beliefs and willingness to teach Jewish students.

The Pringles are also at risk as they still have sweet Sacha Drucker in their flat, and early on we know they have been betrayed and are likely to be raided…

“Truth is a luxury. We can only afford it now and then.”

The Spoilt City is a novel which conveys the physical and human devastation wreaked by war for those not directly caught in conflict. It is deeply moving without being remotely sentimental, and feels entirely believable. I found myself completely caught up in the Pringles’ lives and even (shock horror!) warming to Guy. I’m impatient to read volume three, Friends and Heroes.

I wound up googling Hispano-Suiza cars as Yaki describes his so lovingly. I can’t drive and I’m entirely uninterested in cars, but even I can see this is a lovely machine: