posted on 19 Nov 2018

The Levant Trilogy by Olivia Manning

Olivia Manning (1908 – 1980) was always a writer that suffered from an pretty acute inferiority complex. Her relationship with her contemporary women writers was thorny to say the least and she developed a reputation for being negative and constantly miserable – her nickname of ‘Olivia Moaning’ rather says it all.

You could conclude that history has rather proved her fears to be well founded because she’s a writer who is now very rarely mentioned in the popular literary discourse. But there are those who think this comparative invisibility is unjustified and claim she should be much more highly regarded. Anthony Burgess, for example, was a great champion of her work and said that she had written "the finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer".

Her reputation largely rests now on a series of books that examine the experience of soldiers and civilians in the Second World War and which is known collectively as The Fortunes of War .  It is, in fact, two separate trilogies that are linked by a small cast of common characters. The more famous of the trilogies is known as The Balkan Trilogy which is primarily set in Hungary and Greece  and the second, less well known, is the Levant Trilogy which features Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Syria.

I might not have picked up the three books in the Levant Trilogy were it not for a recent review by Alun Severn of Anthony Powell’s novel sequence,  A Dance To The Music of Time which was featured on this website earlier this month. This started me thinking about whether there were any other series of related books that tried to cover such an extraordinary swathe of time and events. Although Manning’s books aren’t, I don’t think, in the same league as Powell’s, she was clearly trying to do something similar and with a subject – British soldiers and ex-patriots in the Second World War – that is in itself momentous in its import.

The Balkan Trilogy had featured the newly-wed couple of Guy and Harriet Pringle who find themselves being herded by the remorseless advance of the Nazi German army from Hungary, through the Balkans to Greece where they are eventually forced to seek refuge in North Africa. The first book of the Levant Trilogy, The Danger Tree, sees them arrive in Cairo, disorientated and uncertain of their future.

Critics of Manning’s work have noted that she relies heavily on autobiography for the content and shape of her books. Guy and Harriet’s journey and travails closely mirror the experiences of the author and her husband, Reggie Smith, as they too found themselves on a very similar journey. Manning’s skill however is to turn some of this rather literal autobiographical content into engaging and involving fiction. She introduces us to a range of ex-patriot Britons who are clinging on to some sort of colonial existence in Egypt, trying to ignore or deny the seemingly inexorable advance of Rommel in North Africa. She evokes brilliantly the oppressive heat, the shambolic arrangements around consular access, the petty in-fighting and the inevitable affairs and extra-marital flings.

Cleverly though she finds a juxtaposition for all this by introducing a parallel strand that gives us an insight into the fighting frontline of the war that will sit alongside the world of Guy and Harriet Pringle. The story of the 20 year old soldier, Simon Boulderstone will weave into the narrative across all three books – moving in and out of focus as we chop backwards and forwards from the fighting frontline to the increasingly fractious civilians. Simon is searching for his older brother who is also fighting in the desert but the general chaos of war constantly throws up diversions for the younger, inexperienced man.

By the end of the first book and the beginning of volume two, The Battle Lost and Won, Harriet has become the main focus of our interest as her husband Guy becomes increasingly involved in his new job running what seems to be something like a British Council role – part lecturer, part cultural ambassador. Harriet is not just lonely but ill – with amoebic dysentery we later discover – and her erstwhile ‘friends’ become entwined in unsuitable affairs and liaisons.

But the meat and potatoes of this instalment is the convincing and utterly riveting description of Simon Boulderstone as he becomes involved in the battle of El Alemein. Manning is brilliant at conjuring up the confusion, lethargy and sudden danger of war and the sardonic fatalism of the troops. For those of us who have never fought in a war we imagine that the battle proceeds in a strategic and organised way – but here the author shows us just how misguided this view is. It is, in fact, bedlam.

Harriet decides that Guy’s neglect has become intolerable and that she must return to England by boat. At the last moment she changes her mind and heads instead for Damascus and we discover, in a final coda to this second novel, that the ship she should have travelled on was torpedoed with almost complete loss of life.

The final book in the trilogy, The Sum of Things, picks up the story with Harriet’s husband, Guy, believing his wife has died. She however is unaware of the tragedy and continues her tour of Damascus while Simon, who has been badly wounded in the desert, comes into the orbit of Guy who tries to help him adjust. Manning skilfully manipulates the plot to eventually bring Harriet and Guy to a reconciliation that winds the story to its conclusion.

By the end I was left haunted by the characters and especially Harriet who I suspect any reader will find themselves unable not to empathise with. However, even the less well developed members of the cast stay in the imagination well after the story comes to its end and its impossible not to speculate on how their lives will play out. But, having said that, I’m not convinced that this is great novel writing – certainly its very very good but there are some structural problems, especially the running of the two parallel stories that don’t inform each other sufficiently to make the technique work to its optimum potential. There are also some questionable character development issues – Guy is so neglectful of Harriet that his personality verges on the cartoonish and Simon’s naivety in the first novel does seem extreme.

What’s certain is that the trilogy doesn’t deserve to be as neglected as it has become and if you’d like to read it for yourself, copies can be found in a collected paperback edition from Weidenfeld & Nicolson for under £10.

 

Terry Potter

November 2018