The trilogy is getting better as the story progresses; Manning's writing style is absolutely to my liking and the characters are fleshed out and easy to sympathize with.

It's simply impossible for me to review separately the 3 magnificent novels included in Olivia Manning's masterpiece The Balkan Trilogy.

In The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City & Friends and Heroes, the reader will follow the adventures of Guy & Harriet Pringle, a young British expatriate couple, recently married, who live in Bucharest at the beginning of WWII and the story of their escape journey toward Greece prior to the German invasion of Romania. It's simply a masterpiece of postwar European fiction.
Tartishly written, highly entertaining, sad, menacing and full of incredible characters hailing from every corner of Europe, we get sucked into the vortex of their lives and struggles from the get go and it's just an incredible trip from start to finish! Never a dull moment, it's just an unputdownable work of fiction.

Manning went on to write 3 additional novels about this couple and their wartime experience in Greece then Egypt. Better known as The Levant Trilogy it includes The Danger Tree, The Battle Lost & Won and The Sum of Things.
It's high time to put Olivia Manning on the map and finally recognize her for what she is, one of the greatest English but also European novelist of the second half of the 20th century

Many thanks to Netgalley and Random House UK for the opportunity of read this wonderful novel prior to its release date

The Spoilt City follows on from the events in The Great Fortune; Paris has fallen and the ex-pat community in Bucharest are now in an increasingly precarious situation. Romania has to choose an ally, they feel let down by the British, the Russians are on one side, and the Nazi's on the other, there are calls for the pro-British king to abdicate and the Iron Guard are increasing their power base.

The Characters are becoming increasingly irritating in their refusal to see or believe what is actually happening, particularly 'poor old Yaki' who goes to visit his old friend Freddie, now a Nazi officer, and starts boasting about his (imagined) spy work! The Pringles marriage is coming under some strain as they are housing Yaki and a Jewish refugee, and Guy refused to think ahead of worry about any danger.

I must confess that before reading this, I knew next to nothing about Romania's role in WW2, and as this is based largely on Olivia Mannings own experiences there with her husband, it is a fascinating insight into what was happening and it was like to live through it, so a wonderful story, if only for that, though I do like it for much more than just the history.

*Many thanks to the published and Netgalley for a copy in exchange for an honest opinion*

It is 1940 and Bucharest faces the threat of iminent invasion. As Romania loses territory to Hungary and Russia the British residents fear for their survival. Olivia Manning writes so beautifully of everyday events in an extraordinary atmosphere of upheaval that I felt like a fly on the wall witnessing it all as it happened.
Surely one of the most gifted of all writers, evoking empathy in her splendid characters, she is unrivalled in fictional accounts of the Second World War. Harriet (her own alter ego), Guy, the tragic Sasha and poor old Yaki, are drawn intimately, full of moral dilemmas and the anguish of a world gone crazy around them.

It's a strange experience to enjoy reading a book where I found pretty much all the characters unbearable in their mid-century British colonial superiority (*of course* none of them think that perhaps it might be helpful to learn something of Romanian language or culture while living there - no, no, no: they're there on behalf of the British Council, mostly, in order to bring a specifically English form of 'civilisation' to the country). They stick together in the English Bar and most of them barely meet or speak to a Romanian - other than their servants, housekeepers and cooks, as well as waiters and market venders.

What makes this interesting, however, is that the period is 1940 when Bucharest is in a state of political chaos with assassinations, the fascist Iron Guard parading in the streets, calls for abdication, and both Russia and Germany making territorial demands on the sidelines. As the book progresses, so does the Nazi presence - from the raising of a swastika flag to the sinister arrival of the Gestapo with their ominous list.

As Bucharest becomes 'spoilt' (though I was amused to find Harriet reminiscing about how sleek the city once was - from the first book, she spent most of her time moaning about the Romanians, the beggars, and everything else that wasn't English in an unEnglish city), so the gloss also comes off the new Pringle marriage. Guy buries his head in the sand (well, his books) and refuses to stop teaching his summer school despite there being only three students, while Harriet - who is becoming more mother than wife at times - frets about the state of his hair and clothes ('he had wine stains on his tie, his breakfast egg had dripped on to his lapel'), and wrings her hands over whether they will be able to escape before the Germans occupy the city.

It's especially the Pringles' characterisation and the dynamics of their unsatisfactory marriage that I enjoy: she is sensible and full of bourgeois values, even flirting lightly with approval of the fascist Iron Guard who she perceives as 'idealistic' and 'romantic' - yet when Guy refuses to engage with her questions or conversation, when she feels 'gagged' in the marriage as he patronisingly asserts his unthinking masculinity as head of the household, however little he actually fulfills that role, then it's hard not to sympathise with her plight. Equally, when we see Guy ponder on his fear of violence (he's even scared of Harriet losing her temper) or his genuine commitment to his own ideals of social justice (just a shame he can't see that the British Council is hardly neutral and that the very concept of spreading English culture is itself a pernicious form of colonialism), then I have warmer, if compromised, feelings for him. This is not, I'd say, a book to read if you need to like the characters.

What I find problematic is getting a handle on authorial intention (not that the book should, of course, be limited to that): there is material here that reminds me of Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, but where Waugh is clear about the tragi-comic mix, Manning seems almost completely humourless. Some of her portraits are savagely amusing: Prof. Lord Pinkrose who turns up in the middle of an about-to-be-occupied city looking for caviar, good wine and pretty Romanian princesses, and expects the British Council to drum up an audience for a frigid-sounding lecture on the whole of English poetry from Chaucer to Tennyson in about an hour - but there are other places where I'm really not sure whether it is written 'straight' or not. For example, when the Pringles are packing up to leave, Guy determinedly tucks his copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets under his arm, as a clear amulet and shield of English culture against the barbarian hordes! I rolled my eyes - but was I supposed to get misty-eyed about the reminder of Shakespeare as a short-hand for English humaneness and Guy's own cultural sensitivity? Difficult to tell.

Despite having issues with the implied cultural politics of the characters, it's fascinating to see the historical material around Bucharest and I like that Manning doesn't write about the war with a 1960s sense of hindsight: there's a palpable sense of contingency and chaos in the narrative as the characters have to make decisions in a vacuum. I did wonder quite why so many young men (Guy himself is 24) are swanning around Europe rather than being in uniform - is working for the British Council a protected occupation?

So a not unproblematic read for me, but interesting for those very reasons - and I will be reading the next volume to see what happens to the Pringles' marriage next.