The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning

First published: 1981 (includes The Great Fortune, 1960; The Spoilt City, 1962; and Friends and Heroes, 1965)

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: 1939-1941

Locale: Bucharest, Rumania, and Athens, Greece

Principal Characters:

• Harriet Pringle, the protagonist, at the start of the trilogy recently married
• Guy Pringle, her husband, a lecturer at the Rumanian national university in Bucharest
• Prince Yakimov, the son of a White Russian father and an Irish mother, an emigre living in Rumania and Greece
• Clarence Lawson, a colleague of Guy Pringle in Bucharest
• Sasha Drucker, a Jewish deserter from the Rumanian army
• Ben Phipps, a Communist friend of Guy in Athens
• Second Lieutenant Charles Warden, a soldier to whom Harriet is romantically attracted in Greece
• Alan Frewen, a British bureaucrat who becomes involved in collecting intelligence when the Germans and Italians invade Greece

The Novels

In the Orient Express on the way to Rumania at the start of The Balkan Trilogy in 1939, Harriet and Guy Pringle encounter a German refugee on his way to Trieste. The man loses his ticket, passport, visa, and money, and so he is turned over to unidentified officials who remove him from the train, most certainly to return him to Nazi Germany and a terrible fate. Newly married and on their way to Bucharest, where Guy will take a teaching post at the national university, the Pringles are equally alone in a hostile environment. The Rumania to which they are headed is a corrupt monarchy slipping toward Fascism; the local Iron Guard will eventually take over, and German and Italian troops will cross the border. Harriet and Guy work out their relationship with each other against the slowly encroaching backdrop of World War II.

In The Great Fortune, Olivia Manning treats the Pringles as contrasting personalities. Harriet is rational, politically conservative, and somewhat aloof. Guy is extroverted, liberal in his politics, and intensely emotional. Each needs to recognize the inadequacy of his perspective. The events of contemporary history serve to counterpoint details in the domestic life of the Pringles. As Guy and Harriet settle in Bucharest, the pro-Western prime minister, Armand Calinescu, is assassinated and replaced by Take Ionescu, who suppresses the Iron Guard temporarily. The political situation disintegrates as Guy throws himself into his work at the university, his relationships with students, and preparations for a production of William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Harriet finds it more difficult to make friends; she feels most comfortable with Clarence Lawson, Guy’s colleague, who makes romantic advances at the same time that he voices hero-worship of her husband. Clarence calls Guy a saint and accuses Harriet of corrupting his integrity by expecting him to conform to middle-class conceptions of married life. Guy’s production of Troilus and Cressida opens just as Paris falls to the Germans, an ironic juxtaposition that reverberates throughout the trilogy.

In The Spoilt City, political conditions in Rumania deteriorate while Harriet’s confidence in Guy and her commitment to their marriage become more uncertain. She hopes either to be free of him, since she cannot share his enthusiasm for his work, or to escape from Rumania with him to begin life over in another place. Harriet spends time with Sasha Drucker, a Jewish deserter from the Rumanian army whom Guy has allowed to hide in their apartment, and she gradually loses her British sense of moral and social superiority to the “lesser breeds” with whom she is forced to associate. She even musters sympathy for Prince Yakimov, the son of a White Russian father and an Irish mother, whose personality serves to parody Harriet’s own insularity and self-centeredness. The Iron Guard, a body of native Fascists, comes to power; King Carol abdicates, and his son Michael becomes king. Germany seems prepared to come over the border into Rumania, and Sasha is captured in an Iron Guard raid on the Pringles’ apartment. Harriet leaves Bucharest for Greece to find a job for Guy in Athens just as the German military advance begins.

In Friends and Heroes, the Pringles repeat in Greece the pattern of expatriation, settlement, and flight experienced in Rumania. Initially, in Athens, they feel removed from the war. Guy tries to find employment as a teacher, but former associates in Bucharest make things difficult for him with Gracey, his nominal superior. Only when Lord Pinkrose, stranded in Greece because of the war, becomes director of the school does Guy become chief instructor and throw himself into the preparation of English classes. He also interests himself in Greek Communism and considers producing another play. One he considers is Shakespeare’s Othello, an ironic choice in the light of Harriet’s association with Second Lieutenant Charles Warden. She sees Warden initially as a romantic hero, a poetic figure such as those associated with World War I who went into the trenches marked for death. As he seeks to maneuver Harriet into emotional and sexual commitment, however, she sees how ungenerous, selfish, and demanding he is. By contrast, Guy seems sympathetic to her attraction to Warden, and her husband’s affection brings Harriet back to him at the end of the book. She recognizes the value of the emotional support to be found in her marriage. The security this provides Harriet and Guy enables them, at the end of The Balkan Trilogy, to greet the sight of Africa with hope if not optimism. As German troops come over the border of Greece, the Pringles take one of the last refugee ships from Athens bound for Cairo.

The Characters

The relationship of Harriet and Guy Pringle embodies a principle of continuity in the face of the most sweeping social and political changes. The skill with which Manning treats this subject depends chiefly on the way in which she uses narrative point of view, formulating a slightly different angle from which to look at the Pringles in each of the books in The Balkan Trilogy. She objectifies the treatment of Guy and Harriet by restricting the omniscience of the third-person point of view in each of the novels to the consciousness of one or more focal characters, and then she juxtaposes these figures with foils who serve to indicate their strengths and limitations.

In The Great Fortune, the third-person narrator enters the minds of Harriet and of Prince Yakimov, the character who serves as her chief foil in this novel. There is little to choose between Yakimov’s concern with food, drink, and a comfortable place to sleep and Harriet’s inability to give herself to a cause or a friendship the way her husband, Guy, can do. In The Spoilt City, Manning shifts the point of view from Harriet’s to Guy’s mind toward the end of the novel in order to confirm the impression that she is having a nervous breakdown. Her preoccupation with the danger in their situation produces stress, and Guy decides to send Harriet to Greece as early as possible. Manning restricts the third-person narrator of Friends and Heroes to Harriet and thereby makes convincing the gradual development of her understanding of Guy. Less than a week after the departure of Charles Warden for the front, the sight of British soldiers in retreat causes Harriet to believe him dead. Guy comforts her, and she recognizes the depth of his commitment to their marriage.

The objectivity of Manning’s narrative method results in sharp characterizations of even minor figures in The Balkan Trilogy. The impoverished Rumanian aristocrats with whom Yakimov associates, the British colony in Bucharest, and the British soldiers in Athens headed to the front are all individualized portraits. Manning has an eye for telling detail and an ear for dialogue, so the characters in these novels seem to reveal themselves without her aid. She is especially good at creating a series of charming but feckless young men who serve as foils to Harriet’s husband, Guy. First among them is Clarence Lawson in The Great Fortune, the romantic young man who worships Guy at the same time that he makes love to Harriet. In Friends and Heroes, Lawson’s characteristics are divided among Ben Phipps, Charles War den, and Alan Frewen. Phipps, a doctrinaire Marxist, is the sort who feeds Guy’s ego with talk of politics. Warden is the idealist about whom Harriet feels sentimental and affectionate. By the end of the novel, however, she sees through both Phipps and Warden and recognizes in Alan Frewen a genuine combination of romantic adventurer and political operative. Harriet finds Frewen uncongenial at first, but in time she recognizes that Guy is more like Frewen than he is like either Phipps or Warden.

Critical Context

Novelist and critic Anthony Burgess calls The Balkan Trilogy one of the most significant fictional treatments of World War II in Europe. It is the only one to be written by a woman. Unlike Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and The End of the Battle (1961), Manning’s account of the war in the Balkans is neither comic in tone nor retrospective in focus. She does not use Waugh’s technique of juxtaposing the world of the past with the one engaged in military action. Her emphasis is always on present action, and while there is irony, even incidental comedy, in her handling of characters, she does not savage them with quite Waugh’s gusto.

Manning, according to an interview with Kay Dick, had intended to write only two novels about the Pringles in Rumania. The Balkan Trilogy behind her, she wrote about other material before returning to the Pringles in a second trilogy about the war in Egypt. In The Danger Tree (1977), The Battle Lost and Won (1978), and The Sum of Things (1980), Manning continues to probe the impact of World War II on the culture of Western Europe. In these volumes, she takes the reader into the thick of the Egyptian campaign, and her descriptions of military action are as convincing as those of any male novelist dealing with similar material.

The six novels dealing with the Pringles overshadow even such fine work as Manning’s The Play Room (1969) and The Rain Forest (1974). They are the body of work on which Manning’s reputation rests. In part, this is because the experience at the core of them is something important to Manning herself. She clearly needs to make sense of World War II as she experienced it in the Balkans and in Egypt. In part, the significance of The Balkan Trilogy and the three later novels about Harriet and Guy Pringle in Egypt derives from the skill Manning shows in sustaining a complex narrative at such length. The chief reason for the importance of these books, however, is that they capture a particular place and time in history and make sense of them.

Bibliography

Burgess, Anthony. The Novel Now: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction, 1967.

Dick, Kay. Friends and Friendship: Conversations and Reflections, 1974.

Morris, Robert K. Continuance and Change: The Contemporary British Novel Sequence, 1972.

Pendry, E. D. The New Feminism of English Fiction: A Study in Contemporary Women Writers, 1956.

Peterson, Virgilia. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LV (August 28, 1966), p. 4.