Fortunes of War: The Levant Trilogy

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The book opens on the Orient Express as Guy Pringle and his bride, Harriet, head for Bucharest. They have been married barely a week and have known each other for hardly more than a fortnight; this wartime marriage of strangers is the central mystery of the novels: “She could only wonder at the complexity of the apparently simple creature she had married.” Guy, a leftist, is interested in ideas, intensely sociable, generous to a fault; he collects new people with an avid yet somehow impersonal hunger. His Marxism is the substitute for a deep religious urge and, perhaps impelled by his beliefs, Guy becomes a one-man safety net for his many hangers-on in Bucharest.

As the garage door opened, however, through the pouring rain, I could see that the yard waste bin had already been emptied by the local government sub-contracted service. The authenticity of Manning’s writing is beyond dispute, skilfully telling the story of these men at war, as richly evocative of the life in the desert in the sporadic skirmishes as she is at depicting life in the capital among the expatriates. Only towards the very end does it feels like she was over it, having written the two trilogies for a long period of time. The Spoilt City,” is the second volume in Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy. The uncertainty surrounding Romania in the first novel is even more pronounced at the beginning of this book. Rumours and suspicions abound and the English are viewed as likely losers of the war. Harriet begins to long for safety, but Guy refuses to accept that he will have to leave and, to Harriet’s exasperation, throws himself wholeheartedly into organising the summer school at the University.The three books which make up The Levant Trilogy are “The Danger Tree,” “The Battle Lost and Won,” and “The Sum of Things.” These novels follow on from Oliva Manning’s, “The Balkan Trilogy,” in which we first met young married couple, Guy and Harriet Pringle. .” In the Balkan novels, we followed newlyweds, Guy and Harriet Pringle, as they embarked on married life in Budapest – later moving to Greece. “The Danger Tree” sees many of these characters reappear, such as Pinkrose, Dubebat, Lush and Dobson. There are also new characters, such as the young officer, Simon Boulderstone, who has been separated from his unit, and the beautiful Edwina. As always, Harriet is in the unenviable position of seeing Guy always admired, and used, by his many friends; while he gives his attentions to his students, his friends and his acquaintances, but never to her. She feels ill-used, neglected and at a loss of how to help, making excuses for her husband, while the war continues to cause chaos around her. Simon Boulderstone is a good new character, whose attempts to find his unit, his struggles with the life of the army, and the sheer confusion of war, open up a new vista to these books, in showing us the men who are fighting, as well as the civilians who are coping with the encroaching war. Anyhow, I hope Manning was being satirical. Armies shattered, peasants starving, leaders deposed, yet the members of the British Legation feed their higher purpose by innocently reading Miss Austen. Aware of his own ignorance, Simon did not argue but changed course. 'Surely they're glad to have us here to protect them?' Friends and Allies" finds Guy and Harriet in Athens, where they fled after the fall of Rumania into Nazi hands. The two were married after a very brief wartime courtship, and at first Harriet adores Guy and finds him fascinating and brilliant. It doesn't take long for her to realize his shortcomings, mainly his selfishness and self-centeredness regarding anything but his "work". This book finds her contemplating the wisdom of her marriage as she realizes that Guy is unlikely to change.

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. 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.” She moved to London in 1934, in the depths of the Depression when work was very scarce. A series of badly paid jobs left her half-starved in chilly bedsits, but she used every spare moment to write. Her first novel, The Wind Changes, appeared in 1937. Set during the Irish rebellion of 1916, one of its themes is the heroine's exasperation at the way she is excluded from the political discussions and concerns of the two men in her life – and her frustration is manifested in an angry sexuality. As the story begins, Guy and Harriet Pringle are arriving in Romania after a sudden romance and marriage during his leave in England. Now he resumes his lecturing duties in the university and Helen tries to fit in. But the turmoil of Western Europe is now reaching East and Britain's ally is weakening. We become bystanders for all levels of conflict as the Romanian people undergo internal strife, pogroms, onslaught of those fleeing war in other countries, and, ultimately, the realization that the Germans will come. Throughout this the reader also is witness to multiple interpersonal vignettes: the Pringle's marriage, the members of the British Consul, Yakimov ("poor Yaki"), the students and other teachers. Then the escape to Greece. Who will make it to Greece and will Greece be safe?Unsaid is that the British are never foreign. But how far does Manning want the reader to take that? Perhaps very far. Harriet and the naïve new soldier are having this discussion about the 'gyppos': One character receives a "Dear John" letter from his wife in England, seeking a divorce, signed "Ever Yours, Anne".

She wanted a large, comfortable man as friend and companion, like Guy, but without his intolerable gregariousness."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.