Reading the 20th Century discussion

Olivia Manning

Author of The Balkan Trilogy: "Great Fortune", "Spoilt City" and "Friends and Heroes" and The Levant Trilogy as well as many other novels, Olivia Manning is one of my favourite authors.

In his wonderful, bookish memoir, Latest Readings, Clive James stated that she (along with another favourite author of mine, Edward St Aubyn, were great new discoveries of his.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

Anyone else love her books?

Yes. I do like Manning's books. Also a great fan of The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn

I really enjoyed the Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, but I haven't read any others by her as yet. A vivid and haunting depiction of Europe during the Second World War.

The TV adaptation starring Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson and Ronald Pickup was also very good, although the books were better.

Cordelia, you have immaculate taste!

I haven't seen the TV adaptation, Judy, but good to see some love for Olivia Manning. Perhaps, as a group, we can explore some of her lesser known work. I have read both her trilogies twice (which sounds a little like a tongue twister!) but only a couple of her other novels.

I have read The Levant Trilogy and Great Fortune. (The Balkan Trilogy is shelved as Currently Reading because the other two books are on my old kindle with a dead battery, and I have not read them yet.) I have not investigated any of her books other than the two trilogies.

Does anyone have any of her books (outside of the trilogies) they would recommend?

Susan wrote: "Olivia Manning

Author of The Balkan Trilogy: "Great Fortune", "Spoilt City" and "Friends and Heroes" and [book:The Levant Trilogy|62..."

I'm not sure if I thanked you already (if not then thank you) but I read the Balkan trilogy after reading several reviews, yours included, and I absolutely loved it. I'd somehow never heard of Olivia Manning before.
I'll definitely get round to the Levant trilogy at some point in the not too distant future.

Hurrah! I'm so glad you enjoyed it :)

Most definitely did.
I know he was a bit of a stinker and sometimes acutely villainous but I had a huge soft spot for Yakimov.

Me too. He really clung to that coat too, didn't he?!

My but didn't he!
He was a wonderfully drawn character I think, his greed, his pride, his total lack of pride, eventually his sad gentleness. Cracking stuff.

A wonderful character. Guy too, however annoying he was!

I've only read The Great Fortune so far.


I was looking for another series to help me come to terms with having finished Anthony Powell's wonderful A Dance To The Music Of Time series.

I quite liked The Great Fortune and was very impressed by the evocation of Olivia Manning's life as an English expat in Bucharest: I could almost smell the city, taste the food, and I felt I was living everyday life as she lived it.

She is also great at getting under the surface of her relationships with the men around her, especially her idiosyncratic and infuriating husband Guy and the other characters she encounters, not least Yakimov.

She's a wonderful narrator in terms of her ability to evoke a place, an era and her life during this pivotal period. I should probably finish off the series.

Nigeyb wrote: "I've only read The Great Fortune so far.


I was looking for another series to help me come to terms with having finished Anthony Powell's wonderful A Dance To The Music..."

Susan wrote: "A wonderful character. Guy too, however annoying he was!"

Guy did need a clip round the earhole.

Nige I do think you'd enjoy the two other books in the trilogy.

For NetGalley users, volumes 2 and 3 of The Balkan Trilogy are currently available.

I had mixed feelings about the first book, The Great Fortune, in that I enjoyed the portrait of a new marriage and its difficulties but disliked the imperial superiority of the British characters over the Romanians. But I'm tempted to continue anyway.

Susan another fan, I've read 'The Balkan Trilogy' and 'The Levant Trilogy' at least three times now, and will definitely re-read them at some point.

Oh, LOVE those books. One of my favourite reads ever. Preferred Balkan to Levant, but both brilliant.

I've yet to read any of hers, but anticipating that I'm going to like her, I already own The Doves of Venus and The Rain Forest. I really must get round to reading her soon.

Thanks Susan, Netgalley have just sent me the first one, so no excuses now.

Hope you enjoy it, Tania :)

Thank you Susan, and thanks for mentioning they were there. Looking forward to it.

I think it was RC who mentioned they were there, Tania. I am trying to keep away from NetGalley as I am determined to get through my backlog. I have done better this year and read more of my own books, and more non-fiction, which I love. I am resolutely avoiding adding to my review books...

Oops you're right. Thanks RC, and good luck with getting through your books Susan. I have decided to try to only buy 12 books this year. I've tried a complete ban in the past, but tend to crack by Spring. This way, I'll only buy if it's really special.

Yes, there are always new, enticing books out, aren't there? I have a lot of unread non-fiction, in particular, that I really want to read.

New books aren't a problem for me, I can buy them any time or get them from the library. I need to leave myself some leeway for those times I find hard to track down books in charity or second hand bookshops. 😀

I've now been sent the other two books, so I shall be reading the trilogy soon; probably next month now, though. Look forward to it.

Will be interested to hear your thoughts, Tania.

I'm just starting vol. 2, The Spoilt City - and have my fingers crossed that there's less of this kind of commentary that upset my enjoyment of the first book:

'But all Rumanians are much of a muchness. They can absorb facts but can't do anything with them. A lot of stuffed geese, I call them. An uncreative people'

'She placed them in two categories: the honest imbeciles and the intelligent delinquents'.

'If Rumania had been as long under the Austrians as she was under the Turks, she might be civilised now'.

They're all said by different people, including Harriet. Sigh. I so want to enjoy this...

I love Golden Age crime fiction, RC. There are a LOT of authors and comments which don't read well now. One of the reasons why authors I love, such as Christianna Brand, will never really be popular again, are such un-PC attitudes, but even major authors like Christie or Sayers have a lot of things which you couldn't/wouldn't write now. However, it is impossible to judge books written 'then' by the standards of today. It was written in 1962. The attitudes expressed then don't make it a bad book - it's a brilliant book. However, if you find comments expressed then spoils your reading of it, fair enough, but I don't think you can judge it on the attitudes of a different generation.

I know what you mean Susan, I suppose we all have different boundaries though? I avoid Christie because I think her attitudes were linked to her being fairly prejudiced, similarly I don't think I could easily reread Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth because of the anti-Semitic stereotypes, which I'm more conscious of after reading about Wharton's virulent anti-Semitism, pronounced even for its time. But I can cope with Manning because the xenophobia expressed is very revealing of the English abroad in that period and their attitudes, which links to Guy's work which is basically a form of propaganda aiming to spread British culture and 'civilise' and/or bring others into the fold. And RC I know you liked Sam Selvon which I'm interested in too, but another GR friend hated his books because she found the misogyny unbearable. What I was trying to say was that we all have to decide where to draw the line and if the positive aspects of the Manning don't outweigh the parts that are irksome or offensive then it's probably not worth persevering.

I know, I know ;) And I'm obviously not someone who reads literature from across the historical canon expecting it to conform to 21st century values.

But Alwynne, you're right - we all have different lines in the sand. I can note the misogyny in Selvon or Wharton's anti-Semitism without having to throw the book at the wall ;)

I'm really interested in the Pringle's marriage but what I find unbearable is the smugness. As you say, the British Council is not nearly as neutral as they'd like to pretend to be.

I found the comment about Austria 'civilising' Romania particularly vexed for a book set in 1940 with the Nazi encroachment across Europe.

Still, those were comments from the first book - I shall start the second afresh :)

Alwynne wrote: "But I can cope with Manning because the xenophobia expressed is very revealing of the English abroad in that period and their attitudes...

I think from memory that this is how I felt about it too, though I'm not sure it struck me as much how this ties in with Guy's work, as you and RC both point out.

I did find the misogyny hard to take in the only Sam Selvon book I've read, The Lonely Londoners, though it was still a very interesting read. And I think I was possibly more disturbed by the anti-Semitism in The House of Mirth this time around, although I still see it as a masterpiece despite that.

Well, I'm pleased to say I'm getting on better with The Spoilt City :)

I guess the other factor in books is about whether it's the characters who have unpleasant values or the author. I remember someone in the Detectives group refused to carry on with the Amelia Peabody books because she found Amelia's attitudes to Egyptians racist. I think that was Peters showing how Amelia's imperial views change between the first and later books, and that she, as author, is consciously writing a viewpoint in her character that she doesn't share.

I'm not sure that's the case with Manning. Looking at Wiki on her critical reception, some read her as exposing that British attitude to 'foreigners', others as sharing it. I'm in the latter at the moment.

Anyway, interesting chat - and I'm enjoying how Harriet's view of Guy is beginning to change.

Guy is unbearable at times, but a great character. I think, if you like Golden Age crime as much as I do, you really just have to put those attitudes aside.

I am currently reading Mrs Woolf and the Servants and Virginia Woolf uses many racial stereotypes, even though her husband was Jewish, which is slightly jarring, but I still don't think it is wise to judge authors by the standards of today.

I agree we can't judge in the same way Susan, but even today we don't share the same standards, otherwise we wouldn't have had such mainstream support for Brexit or for UKIP and for other groups that are still xenophobic, racist or anti-Semitic. So I'm not sure what it means to judge by the standards of today as even now we don't have shared standards, society seems particularly polarised. And similarly in the past not everyone had the same standards. So I'm not sure that giving everyone a free pass is the way to go either, not that that's necessarily what you're advocating. Like you I read a lot of vintage fiction and there are degrees of prejudice expressed in those works, just as now and there were those who were more prejudiced than others. I find Virginia Woolf fascinating and horribly prejudiced and I recognise that the Bloomsbury group were criticised by others on the left like Ellen Wilkinson for their snobbishness and bourgeois attitudes, but I find other aspects of Woolf enough to make me think her work's worth reading although I condemn certain of her attitudes. Also she doesn't go into great detail about race or class etc in much of her fiction, it's often background rather than foreground, so it's not constantly there as a hurdle to negotiate.

Orwell and others were writing about anti-Semitism as a problem in literature in the 1930s and 40s - Orwell was aware that he had been too blanket in his attitudes towards Jewish people and public awareness was growing of what was happening in Germany and where this type of racism could lead - so after a certain date anti-Semitic attitudes in British literature, for example, were considered telling or revealing of people's politics and not simply mainstream. And there were those authors who distanced themselves from this kind of prejudice. So I'm less forgiving of anyone writing post 1935 who is overtly or forcefully anti-Semitic in their fiction.

I think there needs to be a balance between giving some leeway to authors from past eras for their use of certain terms for example and giving them all a free pass simply because they were writing in the past. They would not all have been given a free pass by their contemporaries. But that is a difficult line to draw. I don't think of Harriet, for example, as a likeable character and I'm not convinced that Manning saw her as a mouthpiece for her own beliefs at all times, but even so I find the novels interesting enough to make them worth reading and less explicitly prejudiced than Christie for example.

Great post, Alwynne and yes, I agree that there are more nuanced positions that acknowledge the complexities of the past which was no more stable and unified in ideological terms than our present.

As you say, discomfiting aspects of racism/sexism/classism/homophobia etc. were not unchallenged even at the time (any time) - if they hadn't been challenged, there would have been no social change. We are the recipients of a history of social justice movements.

I like, too, your distinction between uncomfortable terms and language and more deep-seated prejudices that are displayed in literature. As you say, Woolf's more unpleasant ideas tend not to be on show in her books so we don't need to negotiate them constantly.

We noted a similar dynamic in our Patricia Highsmith/Carol threads where Highsmith was almost gleefully virulent in her personal life, particularly against Jews - even though she writes eloquently against homophobia.

I'm very interested that you think Manning may be more critical of Harriet than I had initially assumed.

Anyway, a very productive conversation - and one which has made my reading of the book even more interesting!

Just popped on to say I'm finding The Spoilt City both way more interesting and far less objectionable than The Great Fortune.

Fascinating discussion between Harriet and Guy in ch.9 where she's lightly seduced by the 'idealism' and 'romance' of the fascist Iron Guard and he dismisses her with a classic gendered move so that 'she felt gagged'.

I'm so glad I persevered. The characterisation is nicely complex: while I'm inclined to have more sympathy for Guy than Harriet, seeing her questions dismissed and her voice muted in this way does change the dynamic between me and the characters.

That's interesting, RC. It's a while since I read the books and by now my memories have faded and are also mixed up with my memories of the TV adaptation, so I can't comment in any detail. But I do remember often feeling more sympathy for Guy than Harriet, because he seems more open to people - she doesn't like him always having so many friendships and being taken up with his work, but that's something I found attractive about him. However, I think how sympathetically the characters are presented fluctuates, as you suggest.

Guy's interesting because on the surface, as you say, he seems to be open-armed to everyone, but Harriet notes that he doesn't have intimacy with anyone, and she includes herself in that.

Also, there's a question about whether his 'work' is just a way of him feeling needed and important - currently, there are hardly any students, the king has gone, the Iron Guard has taken over the government... and he's still insisting that classes must continue? I can sympathise with Harriet's frustrations here.

Was there a TV adaptation? Do you remember who played the Pringles? I could imagine the screenwriters softening some of the edges as I think it's quite an abrasive book. Which I like.

There was a 1987 TV adaptation with Emma Thompson as Harriet, Kenneth Branagh as Guy and Ronald Pickup as Prince Yakimov. I really liked it but I think it probably did soften some of the edges, as you say, and, as far as I remember some years after watching it, there wasn't the same sense of the desperate population.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092353/

That sounds amazing casting and I see the series won various awards. Also that it's where Branagh and Thompson met and fell in love - aw! I checked it on Prime Video but it's not currently available.

Thanks for sharing the link to the movie Alwynne!
I’m finding a lot of great content on YouTube lately.

Brilliant - thanks, Alwynne!

I think I borrowed the DVDs from the library, which shows it was a few years ago!

I can see why all the plaudits for the TV Fortunes of War - I've watched the first three episodes (roughly the first two books) and am enjoying it.

Thinking about the extent to which the screenwriter might have intervened in Manning's vision, I definitely find the Pringles themselves treated in much warmer fashion in the TV series: they're both charismatic and clever, they're in love, Guy is fluent in Romanian and German, they've inserted scenes of him being an inspired lecturer, and they've cut those scenes where Harriet expresses sympathy for the Iron Guard finding them idealistic and romantic.

It also feels like the TV Pringles are the 'normal' couple in a sea of eccentrics, and that there is a bit more affection for the characters. Yakimov is far less self-pitying than in the books.

One of the things that I struggled with in the books was understanding the tone: I wasn't sure if we were supposed to judge or sympathise - the TV series has made it clear that there we are supposed to be on the side of the Pringles.

The TV changes do tend to smooth out what makes the books so interesting - and a bit challenging.

I didn't realise that the TV series covers the Levant Trilogy as well - good for me as I'd like to see how the Pringle marriage plays out.

Thanks, again, Alwynne.

I've finished the first book now and really liked it. I wanted to give Yaki a good shake, I felt sorry for him to begin with, he cut such a woebegone figure, but he didn't help himself. He was the standout character though. I'll start the next in a day or two.

I've just finished a trio of her stand alone novels, having enjoyed her two trilogies a few years ago
School for Love is set in Jerusalem in 1945 or thereabouts and we follow the experiences of Felix , a young teenager thrown into the lodgings of a fabulous and monstrous character ,Miss Bohun. Felix is an orphan and naive and fails to see anything but good in the self serving and manipulative behavior of the landlady , who is penny pinching and completely blind to her own contradictions. She is involved in an obscure group of Christians , part of the nineteenth century European and American impulse to evangelise in The Holy Lands and , to my mind , the novel sings because of her. Of course Felix gradually grows up and becomes less dependent and there are some wonderful set pieces that illustrate the dynamic flux, confusion and desperation of a place on the edge of WW2 but still under the cosh of colonialism .

The Doves of Venus is semi autobiographical and , again , we have a young outsider in the form of eighteen year old Ellie Parsons , up in London and with all the confidence of youth. Its the nineteen fifties and she quickly falls for a married older man whose intentions are dishonorable and flippant . Ellie's life is hand to mouth as she seeks stability as a low paid worker in a workshop creating a sort of shabby chic product . This falseness stands for many other characters behavior but , for me , the novel is spoiled by a conventional ending and too much emphasis on the fragility of beauty

The Rain Forest . Last of the three and a later novel . This didn't work for me at all as Manning strays from her successful seam of writing out of her own experiences to an imaginary island in the India Ocean where British colonialism has decayed . We are in the company of an unhappy couple who don't fit in with anyone at The Daisy Pension, being too bohemian for the straitlaced petty hierarchies and codes of behavior that dominate . The island is seething with rivalries and intrigues as well as being a site of environmental degradation and exploitation on its south facing aspect while the impenetrable rain forest lurks in the north . For me there is enough material here for several novels but Manning tries to cram too many themes into her crowded pages so that the plot jumps about like a grasshopper on acid and its hard to identify with or feel invested in any character .

I finished The Spoilt City a few weeks ago. Guy Pringle is so infuriating! In the “love to hate” category of characters for me, along with Ford Madox Ford’s Christopher Tietjens (to whom he bears some similarities, although their politics are different).

I love the idea that Guy would choose to stage Troilus and Cressida, which has to be one of the most difficult Shakespeares to put over, as it barely seems to be the same play from scene to scene.

Hester wrote: "I've just finished a trio of her stand alone novels, having enjoyed her two trilogies a few years ago
School for Love is set in Jerusalem in 1945 or thereabouts and we follow the ex..."

VERY interesting, Hester! I don’t think that many people read these stand-alones, so your takes are most valuable.

Thanks Patrick . I , too, was increasingly irritated and intrigued by the charismatic, convinced and self confident Guy Pringle . I had thought that my reaction was exaggerated by his similarities to an old lover who was also one for grand events , the more complicated the better and who managed to assemble a willing army of supplicant to execute, his plans , so it's good to hear your experience was similar . I do miss Yakimov so much though ....and interestingly a remarkably similar coat to his turns up in School for Love .

Hester wrote: "Thanks Patrick . I , too, was increasingly irritated and intrigued by the charismatic, convinced and self confident Guy Pringle . I had thought that my reaction was exaggerated by his similarities ..."

Guy has a certain magnetism for the appalled reader, no question, but I keep wanting to say to Harriet, “Leave him!” This is one of the great examples of “Marry in haste, repent at leisure” in all of literature. Harriet’s separate personhood stopped for Guy the moment they tied the knot.

Yakimov frustrates, but also grows on one after a while. I liked the gracious reconciliation between him and Harriet at the end of The Spoilt City.