Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy

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In the novels Harriet also starts to look after a second cat later, which is half-starved, at a time when the characters are all desperately hungry – this cat didn’t feature in the series. He was a spendthrift who spent his BBC salary on friends and strangers in the pub, whereas she invested shrewdly, on the advice, we are here told, of her lover Jerry Slattery.

Eric Lesdema’s Fortunes of War offers an entici Books not nearly as good are touted as definitive portraits of the war; very little on a best-seller list is more readable.

Pop psychology terms like “coping strategies” come to mind: these non-combatants are struggling for survival themselves, but their enemies are not the Nazis so much as the moral and social rootlessness they experience, with military victory, and thus the survival of their ‘home’ countries and values, uncertain, and with reminders of their own mortality and insignificance nearly constant. These volumes cover Manning’s marriage in England in 1939, her journey to Romania where her husband was a young British Council lecturer, and their subsequent war-driven refugee wanderings to Greece, Cairo and Palestine. Other surprises follow: Romania joins the Axis, and before long German soldiers overrun the capital. Then she recognised the suit of English tweed he had been wearing when he had entertained the Pringles to luncheon. She believes she knows everything about the man she has married, but soon realises she knows nothing.

Harriet appears tough, but is also vulnerable and lonely, nuances that Guy often misses as he plunges wholeheartedly into one project after another. In a way she reminded me of Hadley Richardson in Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife and Zelda Fitzgerald in Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler, women who find themselves in the shadows of the larger player, their husband’s lives, men whom other people are drawn too and seek attention from, leaving the wife as a companion and bed warmer for the few hours he finds himself solitary.I admit I’ve read but two of the first 3 novels, The Balkan Trilogy: The Great Fortune and The Spoilt City, but feel I will go on for the third, Friends and Heroes (the title echoing a fellow Anglo-Irish woman, Elizabeth Bowen’s novel, Friends and Cousins). The bed-covers were on the floor, and as Harriet piled them back on to the bed, the mouth-organ fell from among them.

Harriet’s relationship with Guy has always been strained by his inability to put her needs even on the same level as the demands placed on him by everyone else he knows, as well as by his own obsession with his work. Austen does pick a second rate (at best) work, and not the best translation (it’s not) of Kotzebue, and the best one was available in editions that made the circulating library (Thompson was translator of many German plays); Manning not only picks a genius, but a great work whose psychology-as-political meanings are not very often done justice to.and this is intertwined with powerful footage from WW2 — people being killed, tanks, the entry into Paris of the tanks, battlefields over which we hear these practiced British actors speaking Shakespeare’s lines – not in the book.

The central presence is impersonal and we are not permitted to see much inside reflection, especially of her dangerous and idle situation or why she sticks to it (staying by Guy’s side): she sends up the mean utter selfishness of people beautifully by letting them expose themselves. What appeared was an elderly stooping skeleton, a cripple who descended the steps by dropping the same foot each time and dragging the other after. The warder kicked at him again and he fell forward, clutching at the van steps and murmuring “ Da, da,” in zealous obedience.The one major cultural event ends…unexpectedly…without any of the triumphant possibilities of Troilus and Cressida, though perhaps it has as much symbolic significance of its own, maybe even marking a rejection of the idealism that Guy represented. Their efforts are often in vain; as Hitler’s armies spread across Europe and the Levant, the Pringles are repeatedly uprooted and forced to flee by air or sea, finding accommodation and employment wherever they can. I found I could put The Great Fortune down for more than 2 weeks and then pick it up where I left off and it’s just as if I had put it down 5 minutes ago. When a friend offered the insipid comfort that “literature is a house of many mansions,” she wailed: “Then why do I have to be placed in such a shabby attic?