OLIVIA MANNING’S major achievement in fiction has generally been held to be her Balkan Trilogy, which recounts the story of Guy Pringle, an itinerant adult educator, and his submissive wife, Harriet, against the background of World War II. In the sequence that came after, and which she just lived to complete, the adventures of these two were continued in an Egyptian and Lebanese setting.
The Balkan Trilogy and the Levant Trilogy were intended to form a hexateuch called Fortunes of War. If this is published as a single volume it may well appear to be the finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer. Her gallery of personages is huge, her scene painting superb, her pathos controlled, her humour quiet and civilised. Guy Pringle certainly is one of the major characters of modern fiction.
Olivia Manning’s power of imaginative penetration is best seen in The Battle Lost and Won, the second volume of the second trilogy, where she presents the battle of El Alamein from the viewpoint of a combatant – a bold and altogether successful feat. She was never, like so many women novelists, limited to the experiences of her own sex. She recognised, unlike so many of the fictional proponents of feminism, the need for a creative point of view which transcended what her personal life could give her, and this is an aspect of her importance as a novelist and short-story writer.
Stylistically she seems undistinguished, but the unassertive quality of her prose was a deliberately contrived transparency. Where in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet we meet virtuoso description of the exotic which leaves us remembering the words more than the things, in Olivia Manning’s hexateuch we are given impressions of sight, taste and smell with the minimum verbal display. We are somehow convinced that her Balkans and her Egypt must, in topographical and historical fact, have been how she presents them. The solidity of her characters is likewise achieved with very few words.
She worked long and hard at the craft of fiction. Apart from the two trilogies, single novels like Artist Among the Missing and The Rain Forest show a fine capacity for saying much in a small space, for describing sparely and yet leaving behind a considerable resonance. Some of her short stories are among the finest of our time. There is always evidence not merely of a well-tuned sensorium but of a quiet but incisive intelligence.
Her achievement was little known outside Great Britain. The first volume of the Balkan Trilogy was published to critical acclaim in the United States – where, indeed, she is taught in the more discerning departments of contemporary fiction – but she never attained the popularity which might induce American publishers to persevere with her oeuvre. With the completion of her Fortunes of War the entire literary world will be compelled to take notice of a highly individual talent.
Observer, 27 July 1980