Review date: 27/07/2004
Publisher: Arrow, 2000
Published: 1960
Second World War novels featuring Eastern Europe are not all that common in English, but even if Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy didn't have the setting almost entirely to itself, it would still be a classic sequence of novels. The Great Fortune, the first of the trilogy, is set in still neutral Roumania during the period at the beginning of the conflict known as the Phoney War. Guy and Harriet Pringle, a newly married English couple, arrive in Bucharest where Guy has a job in the English department of the university. The novel is structured around the contrast between the familiar Britishness of the Pringles and the exoticism of pre-War Roumania, a country which combined a wealthy ruling class - it was a rich country because of its oil reserves and agricultural fertility - and poverty as grinding as the poorest countries of today, with starving peasants and hordes of professional beggars. A corrupt and incompetent government, trying to manipulate the British and Germans to their own advantage while the populace is terrified of Russian aggression following the invasion of Finland, has brough Bucharest to the point of chaos, frittering away the country's wealth that is the great fortune of the title.
In some ways, The Great Fortune reminds me of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time novels, with the same satirical air; but for me Manning is more successful. The interest provided by the background is sadly lacking in Powell's novels, even the ones set during wartime, and Manning is able to solve the plotting problem Powell had with coincidence (both having a small group of characters constantly running into one another by chance) by setting her work in the small emigré community. The absurdities caused by the culture clash between the English and the Roumanians are to me much more felicitously reminiscent of some of my favourite humourous short stories, Lawrence Durrell's Antrobus collections. (The resemblance is particularly strong in the section of The Great Fortune in which the Briish diplomatic corps mount an amateur production of Troilus and Cressida, here set against the background of the German invasion of France on the other side of Europe.)
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Copyright © Simon McLeish, 2004