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  • Procrustes’ Bed
  • George Core
Olivia Manning: A Woman at War by Deirdre David (Oxford University Press, 2013. Illustrated. xviii + 406 pages. $45)

Olivia Manning (1908–1980) is a woman of letters well known in England but not, alas, in the United States. Some of her best work, especially The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, remains in print; a previous biography by June and Neville Braybrooke was published in London by Chatto and Windus in 2004; and this superb new biography is being published this spring by Oxford—all of which testifies to Manning’s continuing significance as a woman of letters, especially as a novelist. In all she wrote thirteen novels, three books of stories, two travel narratives, and hundreds of book reviews for such English periodicals as Horizon, the Observer, the Spectator, and the Sunday Times as well as the Jerusalem Post; and her short stories appeared in a wide variety of magazines such as Windmill, Punch, New Stories, Modern Reading, the Transatlantic Review, and the Kenyon Review.

She began her career as an artist and a painter, not as a fiction writer; but her skill as an artist enabled her to excel at creating seascapes and landscapes and beautifully detailed descriptions of the sky (especially night scenes that recall Constable and Turner). She was also remarkably astute in presenting the physiognomies of all manner of people—from the grotesquely ugly to the strikingly handsome. Her descriptive powers [End Page xiii] are essential to her wide range of original characterization, but the delineation of her vast number of figures is also accomplished by her spare and elegant prose, her exact ear for dialogue, her ironic and unsentimental control of her narratives and the credible unfolding of her complicated plots, her avoidance of being belletristic, and her acute psychological analysis of the many people revealed in the fictive action of her stories and, especially, her novels.

She should be credited with inventing a form of the historical novel that combines what Deirdre David defines as autobiographical fiction, an artful joining “of private memory and public record,” demonstrating great “historical verisimilitude.” These novels embody a “seamless integration of historical actuality into fictional narrative.” Manning was, as Roy Foster has observed, an ironic and observant eyewitness “to the way people behave under pressure.” Relatively few of her characters perform with grace and civility; many of them are more nearly cowardly and hysterical and selfish than generous and courageous and helpful. Manning explores a wide range of characters, using the English colony in Bucharest, an oddly assorted group that moves from there to Athens and on to Alexandria and then to Cairo, as a dramatic focus for the central action of the trilogies (especially the second), which are orchestrated by the enveloping action of the war that after many British setbacks rises to its climax with the British victory at El Alamein.

The war is seen through a young English subaltern, Simon Boulderstone, who is badly wounded but survives and recovers his health. He is one of the two principal characters in The Levant Trilogy; the other is Harriet Pringle, who is carried over with her feckless husband, Guy, from The Balkan Trilogy. So she and Simon are the principal means of providing what Deirdre David acutely deems the “double narrative” of the second and more successful trilogy. The first trilogy is a version of picaresque as the English colony moves laboriously to stay ahead of the Nazis and to escape precariously to Egypt. The first trilogy can also be read as a tragicomedy, as is the play directed by Guy, Troilus and Cressida, which provides the culmination of the second novel, The Spoilt City. The play “mirrors both the characters of the amateur actors,” such as the treacherous Yakimov (who soon after is killed), and “the real, unheroic war which is about to engulf them all,” as one critic observes. The play is performed on the day that Paris has fallen to the Nazis, a chillingly ironic happenstance. This performance, despite various complications and reversals, provides Guy’s finest hour in the trilogies.

Manning’s war novels begin with her rendition of the Irish rising against the English in The Wind...

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