“It occurred to her that they were not, in fact, grown-up enough for the life they were living.” (Olivia Manning, The Great Fortune)

June 30, 2026June 29, 2026 / madamebibilophile / 29 Comments

It was JacquiWine’s enthusiasm for Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy which caused me to add it to the TBR, and a conversation with Marcie in the comments of Jacqui’s Levant Trilogy post which led to me finally getting the first instalment read! I’m delighted that Marcie and I are doing a buddy read for all three volumes this year, starting with The Great Fortune (1960) in June.

I’d originally planned to get this read by good time starting in April, but life took over, then novellas, and I’ve ended up finishing it on 29 June – one day spare! It says something for Manning’s writing that even my terrible memory and total inability with names kept her pretty large cast of characters straight despite a gap of about 8 weeks or so…

Guy and Harriet Pringle are newly married. The book opens with their arrival in Bucharest, a new experience for Harriet, but Guy has been there a year, working for the British Council at the university. It is 1939 and the new war across Europe looms large.

“‘Who is that?’ Harriet whispered. ‘Does he know us?’

‘Everyone knows us. We are the English. We are at war.’

‘But who is he?’

‘lonescu, the Minister of Information. He’s always here.’

‘How odd to live in such a small capital!’

‘There are advantages. Whatever happens here, one is in the midst of it.’”

It’s a time of adjustment to a new life and each other, against a rapidly changing, unstable background. Harriet begins to realise they are not easily compatible, with Guy’s relentless sociability at odds with her need for intimacy:

“They had slipped into marriage as though there could be no other possibly resolution of such an encounter. Yet — supposing she had known him better? Supposing she had known him for a year and during that time observed him in all his other relationships? She would have hesitated, thinking the net of his affections too widespread to hold the weighty accompaniment of marriage.”

The characterisation of these two young people is complex. Although Guy is constantly in company, this is motivated by his communist beliefs and a general generosity of spirit, rather than any particular interest or warmth regarding individuals.

“Guy said: ‘He leads his life, as we all do. What do you care what he does?’

‘Naturally I’m interested.’

‘Why be interested in people’s private lives? What they are pleased to let us know should be enough for us.’

‘Well, I just am. You’re interested in ideas; I in people. If you were more interested in people, you might not like them so much.’

Guy did not reply. Harriet supposed he was reflecting on the logic of her statement, but when he spoke she realised he had not given it a thought.”

My experience of Guy was that he was one of the most irritating, infuriating characters I’ve ever come across. His generosity paradoxically made him entirely selfish, as he seemed to have no real consideration for Harriet at all. She isn’t particularly likeable either, often xenophobic and begrudging with people. But as their relationship matures, she is more forgiving than me, recognising “a husband made unreliable only by his abysmal kindness”.

Manning makes them both so real (apparently based on her and her husband) that it became of little consequence that I didn’t like them – I wanted to hear about their lives at this time. Guy does live by his ideals, so he is not a deliberately unkind person, just utterly oblivious. He has enough redeeming qualities for Harriet’s love to be understandable:

“We must help him, not because he’s a good person but because he needs help. You understand that.”

Through Guy, we meet a range of characters who have ended up in Bucharest at this particular moment. These include but are not limited to:

Sophie, a student Guy considering marrying in order for her to have a passport – in his usual way he is unconcerned regarding her being in love with him; Sacha is another of his students, part of an immensely rich family called the Druckers; Harriet makes friends with Bella, an English woman married to a Romanian, Nikko Niculescu; we meet staff at the university, and journalists at the English Bar. Manning handles her large cast deftly, and even the less prominent characters are sketched distinctly.

There is also my favourite character – in many ways equally irritating as Guy – Prince Yakimov, an Irish/Russian prince. Yakimov is perpetually sponging off his friends, promising an always due to arrive remittance, pleading with them to pity “poor Yaki”. He is preoccupied by fine food, and starving most of the time. His English is peppered with phrases that sound almost Wodehouseian. He is utterly ill-equipped to deal with life in any way whatsoever, and yet somehow he endures on his own terms:

“Had Yakimov been content to eat modestly, he could have existed from one remittance to the next, but he was not content. When his allowance arrived, he ate himself into a stupor, then, penniless again, returned, a beggar, to the English Bar. It was not that he despised simple food. He despised no food of any kind. When he could afford nothing more, he would go to the Dâmbovița and eat the peasant’s staple food, a mess of maize. But food, rich food, was an obsessive longing. He needed it as other men need drink, tobacco or drugs.”

The progress of the war is documented, but never heavy-handed. The characters stop by a publicly displayed map of Europe which shows the fall of Poland and the invasion of Denmark, Norway, and the Low Countries. Through the journalists in the English bar, the Battle of Dunkirk is relayed.

As the risk to Harriet and Guy grows, he responds surprisingly by becoming entirely wrapped up in producing a performance of Troilus and Cressida. I found this an intriguing choice by Manning. One of Shakespeare’s less well-known plays, it is tonally deeply odd. A tragedy but filled with unpleasant characters, a comedy but in bad taste a lot of the time. Harriet observes that everyone seems to be playing themselves. Yaki is commended for his portrayal of Pandarus, but Pandarus is a pimp. The play ends with that character wishing venereal disease on the audience – yuck. I love Shakespeare but Troilus and Cressida tests that assertion more than any other of his works.

It is a play about the Trojan war, so in a way it shows again how young and naïve so many of the characters are, play-acting while a very real war grows ever-more threatening. It also adds to the general sense of uncertainty, with very little to secure your knowledge or hope upon.

“Guy came hurrying in behind them. […] His size gave her an illusion of security — for it was, she was coming to believe, no more than an illusion. He was one of those harbours that prove to be too shallow: there was no getting into it. For him, personal relationships were incidental. His fulfilment came from the outside world.”

This volume ends in June 1940, and so as readers we know that these characters still have so much conflict to live through.

I’ve only scratched the surface of The Great Fortune, but this post is already far too long! It took me a while to get back into this novel, before something clicked and I whizzed through the remainder. I’m really looking forward to carrying on the story with The Spoilt City.

In 1987, the BBC made both trilogies into a seven-part series, which seems a lot to squeeze in. I think I might give it a try, once I’ve finished reading them all…

If anyone would like to join us for this buddy read, please do! We’ll be posting in The Spoilt City in August and Friends and Heroes in October.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.15

May 15, 2026May 15, 2026 / madamebibilophile / 27 Comments

I had an interesting experience reading The Gulls Fly Inland by Sylvia Thompson (1941). The blurb on the back made it sound like a thwarted-lovers type story. This wouldn’t really pique my interest but the war setting and reliability of Handheld Press’ choices meant I decided to give it a go.

Around page 70, I wondered why I was enjoying it, when the characterisation of the love interest, Vernon, was practically non-existent. I knew basically nothing about him. Yet I was enjoying the novel because in fact, it was more to my taste than I’d expected, portraying families and changing interwar society with an elegiac tone. I returned to the novella, and a few pages on there was this:

“I have been reading what I have written since I began. So far I think I have made better portraits of people I have loved less. […] Whatever I have written of Vernon seems true, but like a conventional photograph; not evocative. […] Perhaps I have only added up little characteristics, but failed to explain him.”

Well, that acknowledgement won me over entirely!

The Gulls Fly Inland takes the form of a diary written by Blanche Lancret, a young French woman exiled to England by the Second World War. She begins on 3 October 1939, and writes not only of her current circumstances but of her past, her friends and family, and her romance with Vernon, brother of her American schoolfriend Annabelle.

Throughout the diary, as she pines for Vernon, she also pines for France, Europe, and a time she knows is lost forever:

“For, as my father gave me one Paris, and my schooldays another, Vernon gave me still another; and the roots of the third Paris are those we followed together […] in this Paris, which is the one I have still in my heart, there are corners made significant by our moments of brilliant feeling as by sudden effects of floodlight.”

Blanche’s life is one of reasonably wealthy privilege. At the start of the novel she has Annabelle’s baby, her goddaughter, Camilla Blanche, living with her, while the rest of the Annabelle’s children recover from chickenpox. But of course she doesn’t have to care for a baby, the nanny has come too. She and Annabelle met at boarding school, and Blanche spends her holidays on the French Riviera with my favourite character, her mother’s half-sister Tante Julie.

“For I knew, by now, that my aunt, though never actually demi-mondaine, did not take part in any reputable social life; and did not desire to. I did not understand then her greatest distinction, which is that she lives according to her own values; and of all the artificial values respects only money and fashion.”

I also found Tante Julie’s love interest, Otto Behrens, more fully realised than Vernon:

“I was charmed by his brown bird-lidded eyes which shone clear with his natural goodness of heart, for unlike many worldly people he loves his world.”

Blanche’s father is loving but incapacitated by grief for his wife who died of pneumonia. He lives in Venice, physically and somewhat emotionally distant. And so the impact of the war will be felt across the continent in a very personal way for Blanche.

As time goes on, we see a maturing of Blanche, from schoolgirl to young woman who is increasingly aware of the world, politically and socially.

“Suddenly seduced, as happens to me from time to time, by England, or at any rate by the England which I have been able to enjoy—that is, which ignores a dozen Englands which I either do not know or do not wish to experience; industrial England, political England, England expressed in Midland towns, in dockyards, in suburbs, in slums.”

The Gulls Fly Inland is a very subtle novel. The sadness of what it portrays crept up on me, as Blanche’s friends and family gradually accept that their lives are changing forever, by forces beyond their control. There is love in many guises here: romantic, familial, between friends, for place and for time. It is truly moving, and of course, at the time of writing, Sylvia Thompson did not know what the outcome of the conflict would be.

Although sad, the resilience and strength of the characters means it is not depressing. There are sparks of humour too, as Blanche can be a witty and slightly spiky narrator:

“What Annabelle says is often self-evident, but she gives the sentence to you like a present, prettily tied up with a ribbon of your favourite colour.”

So The Gulls Fly Inland wasn’t at all the book I expected, and so much the better for it – but for those of you without wizened hearts like mine, rest assured there are some romantic moments too!

To end, a wartime classic apt for Blanche and Vernon, and I chose a version sung by an American group in honour of Vernon:

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” (Vincent van Gogh)

September 20, 2016June 9, 2018 / madamebibilophile / 24 Comments

This is my contribution to Small Press September, hosted by Bibliosa. Do head over to her blog to read all about it and join in! The novels are also two more stops on my Around the World in 80 Books Reading Challenge, hosted by Hard Book Habit.

Firstly, Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos (tr.Rosalind Harvey, 2011), which I picked up after reading Shoshi’s excellent review. It is published by And Other Stories, a not-for-private-profit company which concentrates mainly on translated fiction. That sentence makes me feel better about the world 🙂

Back to the novel: Tochtli (rabbit in Nahuatl, an indigenous language of Mexico), tells us about his love of samurai films, hats, learning new words, and his life as the young son of a drug baron, Yolcaut (rattlesnake).

“I think we have a very good gang. I have proof. Gangs are all about solidarity. So solidarity means that because I like hats, Yolcaut buys me hats, lots of hats, so many that I have a collection from all over the world and all periods of the world. Although now more than new hats what I want is Liberian pygmy hippopotamus. I’ve already written it down on the list of things I want and given it to Miztli. That’s how we always do it, because I don’t go out much, so Miztli buys me all the things I want on orders from Yolcaut.”

The isolation is a necessary part of his father’s business, whose paranoia is an occupational hazard that is no doubt keeping them all alive. The tragic effect that this is having on young Tochtli becomes increasingly apparent as the story progresses. Tochtli accepts his life, knowing no different, but to the adult reader he displays worrying signs of severe anxiety: wanting his head shaved because he doesn’t want ‘dead’ hair on him, compulsively wearing hats, constant severe stomach pains, and later, after he sees something his father tried to keep hidden, selective mutism. He also takes violence pretty much in his stride:

“One of the things I’ve learnt from Yolcaut is that sometimes people don’t turn into corpses with just one bullet. Sometimes they need three or even fourteen bullets. It all depends where you aim them. If you put two bullets in their brains they’ll die for sure. But you can put up to 1,000 bullets in their hair and nothing will happen, though it might be fun to watch.”

Although dealing with extremely serious subject matter, there is humour is the novel, such as Tochtli’s description of the preparation for a drug run to Liberia which he also goes on in order to get one of his beloved pygmy hippos:

“By the way, Franklin Gomez started being Franklin Gomez yesterday in the airport. That’s what his passport from the country of Honduras says: Franklin Gomez. There were problems because Franklin Gomez didn’t want to be Franklin Gomez. Until Winston Lopez convinced him.”

In such a short tale (70 pages in my edition)Villalobos effectively widens the narrative of drug trade away from the usual barons/dealers/ users paradigm to show how the fallout from the industry can reach far and wide, including devastating those too young to have a choice about their own involvement. It is a truly moving story, not about drugs (you can read an article by the author where he refutes the term narcoliteratura here), but about children trying to cope with the messy, corrupt world adults create around them: sadly, pretty much a universal theme.

Fellow hat enthusiast, the late Isabella Blow, wearing Philip Treacy’s Castle hat

Image from here

Secondly, The Notebook by Agota Kristof (1986, tr. Alan Sheridan, 1989) published by CB editions, a publishing house which focuses on short fiction, poetry and translations. Kristof was Hungarian but was exiled to French-speaking Switzerland in 1956, and wrote this, her first novel, in French.

Like Down the Rabbit Hole, The Notebook is told from a child’s point of view, in this instance twin boys – we never know their individual names and they always use the first-person plural – who are evacuated to live with their maternal grandmother in the countryside of an unnamed nation, but which is generally thought to be Hungary.

“We call her Grandmother. People call her the Witch. She calls us ‘sons of a bitch’…Grandmother never washes. She wipes her mouth with the corner of her shawl when she has finished eating and drinking. She doesn’t wear knickers. When she wants to urinate, she just stops wherever she happens to be, spreads her legs and pisses on the ground under her skirt.”

This woman shows them no love or affection (although as the novel progresses we learn to recognise the small signs that she does care for them) and life is tough. They work on her smallholding and undertake various psychological ‘exercises’ to try and adjust to their straightened circumstances.

“ ‘My darlings! My loves! My joy! My adorable little babies!’ When we remember these words, our eyes fill with tears. We must forget these words because, now, nobody says such words to us and because our memory of them is too heavy a burden to bear. So we begin our exercise again in a different way…By repeating them we make these words gradually lose their meaning and the pain that they carry in them is reduced.”

The tone of the narration is astonishing. As the boys become more and more detached in an effort to preserve themselves from the horrors they witness, the reader is faced with filling in the gaps regarding what is happening. The delivery is so matter-of-fact that more the once I found myself stopping, thinking ‘Wait a minute, what the…’, going back and finding that something devastating had been described and I’d nearly missed it.

“Words that define feelings are very vague; it is better to avoid using them and to stick to description of objects, human beings and oneself; that is to say, to the faithful description of facts.”

The Notebook is a shattering work, and a challenging read. Human relationships are warped under the pressures of war. More than once, these pretty, golden twins get drawn into adult sex games. A young girl who is named after her birth anomaly – Harelip is apparently her given name – engages in some truly upsetting sexual acts. A neighbour behaves with horrific cruelty toward a group of starving people (presumably Jewish prisoners) and the boys wreak a terrible revenge (which they never admit in the text but you know what has happened and why). It is a difficult read but a powerful one, which does not shy away from the damage done when the acts of nations cause individuals to lose sight of their humanity. It is a political book, but not a polemical one: the twins’ equanimity leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions.

“Later, we have our own army and government again, but our army and government are controlled by our Liberators. Their flag flies over all the public buildings. The photograph of their leader is displayed everywhere. They teach us their songs and their dances; they show us their films in our cinemas. In the schools, the language of our liberators is compulsory; other foreign languages are forbidden.”

Highly recommended, but go in prepared – brilliantly written and completely brutal.

The Notebook was adapted into a film in 2013, which completely passed me by. From this trailer it looks excellent, and thankfully laws protecting children and animals means certain scenes are guaranteed to have not been filmed, surely?