{"id":8507,"date":"2021-12-24T08:19:49","date_gmt":"2021-12-24T08:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8507"},"modified":"2022-01-05T12:19:03","modified_gmt":"2022-01-05T12:19:03","slug":"the-balkan-trilogy-by-olivia-manning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8507","title":{"rendered":"The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Comprising: The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City, Friends and Heroes<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Windmill, Penguin Random House 11 February 2021<\/strong><\/p>\n

Paperback, \u00a38.99 each<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Elizabeth Hilliard Selka<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Like many of my generation, I came to The Balkan Trilogy<\/em> through Fortunes of War<\/em>, the magnificent BBC television dramatization broadcast in 1987. This melded Olivia Manning\u2019s three novels known together as The Balkan Trilogy<\/em> with the following three which continued the story of Harriet and Guy Pringle\u2019s adventures into The Levant Trilogy<\/em>. Though the six volumes make one narrative, there is a clear break between the two trilogies, and in fact Olivia Manning wrote them many years apart, Balkan<\/em> published in the early to mid-1960s and and Levant<\/em> between 1977 and 1980. The production values of the BBC\u2019s Fortunes of War<\/em> were outstanding, as was its cast, the latter a roll-call of British acting talent, and famous particularly for Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh having fallen in love on set in the lead roles. Reader, she married him.<\/p>\n

To a teenage ing\u00e9nue,<\/em> this liaison charmingly mirrored and reinforced the tension of our protagonists\u2019 shifting on-screen relationship. Guy has met Harriet on his summer holiday at home in England from his job (funded by the Organization) teaching English at the university in Bucharest; the first novel, The Great Fortune<\/em>, opens with the young couple newly plighted and travelling by train across Europe to Romania. The Organization is Manning\u2019s name for the British Council, which did in fact employ Olivia Manning\u2019s husband RD \u2018Reggie\u2019 Smith.<\/p>\n

The novels are autobiographical and thus offer us a riveting insider\u2019s view of the confusion in Eastern Europe in the first year of the Second World War \u2013 and the insider, herself an outsider, is Harriet. Woven into the day-by-day unsettling \"\"<\/a>upheavals of the politics and practicalities of war is the story of Harriet\u2019s marriage, her growing understanding of the man she has so suddenly married and revelations about the unforseeable complexities of love. The day after the BBC televization finished I fell upon the six novels and consumed them hungrily, devouring the additional riches of character and drama, detail and nuance afforded by some thousand printed pages.<\/p>\n

Now Windmill Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, have reissued the trilogy as individual novels, The Great Fortune<\/em> (with introduction by Rachel Cusk) followed by The Spoilt City <\/em>and finally Friends and Heroes<\/em>. Quite apart from these books being easier to stuff in one\u2019s handbag (the trilogy is a bit of a doorstop), this reissue offers an opportunity not only to revisit the oeuvre after some decades but also to consider the novels afresh as individual works. Moreover, in the intervening years I have myself gained experience of marriage, if not of war (unless one allows this weird past year-or-more of unprecedented world-wide panic and devastating lockdowns, censorship and moral indignation as a parallel of sorts), so I was interested to discover if coming to the works with more worldly experience altered their personal fascination for me. Would I find Harriet\u2019s experiences here described dated or irrelevant, her inexperience and innocence tiresome and her emotions unconvincing, now that I was myself a wise old(er) woman?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Besides Harriet and Guy, The Balkan Trilogy<\/em> is peopled with as sublime a cast of theatrical characters as any Dickens novel, so many of them that in a less meticulous writer one might lose track. There is the repellent Professor Lord Pinkrose, dazzling Bella Niculescu, rapacious Sophie, masterful \u2018Dobbie\u2019 Dobson, repellent Dubedat, melancholy Alan Frewin\u2026 The most fascinating is impoverished scrounger Prince Yakimov. \u2018Your poor Yak\u2019, as he refers to himself, appears in the very first chapter and, finally, in almost the last. He is magnificent, provoking extreme emotions in the reader as in Harriet \u2013 like some of the most compelling people in real life he is maddening yet irresistible, childlike and egregiously selfish but never dull \u2013 and was based on Julian Maclaren-Ross, whom John Betjeman described as \u2018one [of] the most gifted writers of his generation\u2019. Manning knew Ross and transforms the drink-and-drug fuelled flamboyant spendthrift into the son of an Irish mother and Tsarist father.<\/p>\n

Yakimov\u2019s perennially distinguishing feature is his sable-lined greatcoat (\u2018I wonder, did<\/em> I tell you that the Czar gave it to m\u2019poor old dad?\u2019) which we watch become ever more ragged as the novels progress. The evolution of Harriet\u2019s relationship with Yakimov over the course of the three novels is, after her marriage, the most poignant marker of her unfolding circumstances and maturity, more so than the changes wrought by her quasi-love affair with Charles Warden. On reading again after so long, I find that I am moved as much by Yakimov\u2019s life and (spoiler alert) death (he goes to his grave wrapped in the wretched greatcoat) as by Harriet\u2019s devotion to Guy.<\/p>\n

For Guy is a man glamorous and generous, who in his prime cannot be satisfied with one person but must gather round him and give of himself to as many like-minded people as possible \u2013 how indeed such men exist in the real world, and what a risk we take in marrying them! Harriet discovers Guy to be consequently neglectful and careless of her happiness. Yet it is wartime, and with so much changing around them they hold fast to each other and remain loyal, discovering that in spite of everything they do love each other. This complexity I find if possible deeper and more moving rather than less so, coming again to the novels with more experience of the shifting sands of human nature as revealed in impermanent real-life relationships. In the real world and in spite of their both having affairs, Olivia Manning and Reggie Smith viewed their marriage as immutable and remained together for more than 40 years till her death in 1980.<\/p>\n

The Balkan Trilogy <\/em>is a slow-burn psychological thriller. Great Fortune<\/em> starts with Harriet\u2019s arrival in Bucharest and ends with Guy\u2019s triumphant production of Shakespeare\u2019s Troilus and Cressida<\/em> and the chilling announcement as the crowds emerge from the theatre that \u2018Paris has fallen\u2019\u2026 Spoilt City<\/em> begins ten months after Great Fortune<\/em>, in a hot June 1940; it is a tense, waiting drama, a web of political machinations concerning Germany\u2019s increasing demands over Bessarabia and Romanian food production, and personal devastation in the fall of Guy\u2019s Jewish friends the Druckers. It ends with Harriet evacuated from Bucharest to Athens alone without Guy but with Yakimov as a friend. In Friends and Heroes<\/em>, Harriet and Guy are reunited, but Harriet is drawn to Charles Warden; after months of cold, humiliation and privation Harriet and Guy narrowly escape Greece for Egypt.<\/p>\n

Though I could not undo my knowledge of each previous volume, I did pause and read other work between the novels, yet I was quickly drawn in afresh each time and found I was impatient to immerse myself again in Harriet\u2019s life and loves, however painful. I believe there are sufficient explanations to satisfy anyone arriving unwittingly at the second or third volume. What did delight me and which I had barely noticed in my immature reading was to some extent Manning\u2019s dry humour but above all her physical immediacy, her relish of the colours, sights, smells and flavours of Harriet\u2019s world. The Balkan Trilogy <\/em>is revealed to be not only clear-sighted, immersive and moving in charting parallel marital and societal disintegration and (for Harriet and Guy at least) redemption, but also an intensely observant and sensual work. Rich and delicious \u2013 an undoubted feast, possibly a masterpiece.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

* A 2021 Notable Book<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Elizabeth Hilliard Selka<\/p>\n

The novels are autobiographical and thus offer us a riveting insider\u2019s view of the confusion in Eastern Europe in the first year of the Second World War \u2013 and the insider, herself an outsider, is Harriet. Woven into the day-by-day unsettling upheavals of the politics and practicalities of war is the story of Harriet\u2019s marriage, her growing understanding of the man she has so suddenly married and revelations about the unforseeable complexities of love […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8507"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8507\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8572,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8507\/revisions\/8572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}