The Levant Trilogy

The Danger Tree is the fourth of Olivia Manning's six-novel series following Guy and Harriet Pringle as World War II, which has now pushed them as refugees into Egypt. What they find there is the flotsam of war. Refugees are pushed from place to place. People whose hold on life may not have been very strong to begin with are now scrambling just to survive. Rumors swirl of a German breakthrough to Cairo that could happen at any moment. Little real news from the front gets through, and meanwhile panicky people are heading for Jerusalem or points further away from the Germans. Manning captures a pervasive seediness among the marginal characters who surround the Pringles, rats figuring out when to scurry from this maybe-sinking ship. Guy Pringle, as ever, is too wrapped up in his work and too good-hearted. He's someone who thrives on human contact and so befriends every needy person seeing in him a safe haven. Meanwhile, he neglects Harriet, who is lonely in Cairo, having neither career, family nor social position to fall back upon, and only a shaky temp job at the American Embassy, where she'll soon be replaced by Americans now en route. She sees how people use Guy and how his dreamy idealism keeps him from seeing that himself. Manning introduces a new character, young British officer Simon Boulderstone, newly posted to a disorganized army trying to stiffen its resistance and stop Rommel's rout of them. Socially segregated as a junior officer, both from superior officers above and from enlisted men below, he is lonely. He wonders if he can ever link up with his brother, stationed somewhere in the vicinity. And although newly married, he is dazzled by his brother's girlfriend whom he meets back in Cairo. Manning's Army scenes convey little sense of military purpose. Boulderstone receives no orientation; no one tells him anything. His unit receives vague orders with no way to implement them, and his commanding officer covers his own ignorance and inexperience by keeping a gruff distance. It sometimes seems more like a Monty Python parody of Army life - "just muddle through" taken to extremes that would be comic if they weren't so depressing. On the other hand, Manning isn't writing an action novel here. Perhaps for the British Army at this low point, before El Alamein, this conveys something of what put them on the ropes in the first place. She imputes female psyches to the men, whom she sees as craving intimacy and silently obsessed with who is friends with whom. Is this a side of combat that doesn't usually get written, but needs to be? Or is she a woman writing unrealistically about a man's world? Boulderstone is at first crushed when separated from two men he bunked with on the long voyage from England around the Cape and finds another soldier having the same experience. Manning hints at a fair amount of submerged homosexuality - she never uses the word, but her meaning is clear - among both the civilian and military men here. (No member

I loved both the Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy. I was sorry when I got to the end and still wished for more, despite the considerable length of what amounts to 6 sequential novels. These novels are wonderful for the high quality of the writing, the sharp insight into long-term marriage, friendships and other types of relationships, for the large range of characters, for the exotic settings in Rumania, Greece, Egypt, and other parts of the Middle East, and for the unusual perspective on living through WW II. The story is told mostly from the edges of the conflict rather than the battlefield, although the Levant Trilogy does have some very compelling parts set in the desert battlefields of North Africa. I am sorry that this excellent writer is, for the most part, no longer in print. It's well worth the trouble to seek out her books!

The big complaint I had concerning Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy (in what was otherwise a generally favourable review) was that it was too far removed from the war, that it was centred too much around Guy and Harriet Pringle and their retinue and marital squabbles while there was a bleeding war afoot. Other readers must have had something of the same reaction, for Manning gives a fair go here at depicting things from someone else's point of view than Harriet's in the form of second lieutenant Simon Boulderstone's (Where O where did you get that surname Olivia?) perspective from the front lines against Rommel's desert campaign. But, perhaps predictably, it doesn't last, and Simon is invalided out of the war before too long and becomes another player in the grand dance of Guy and Harriet - from Harriet's/Olivia's point of view of course, until the last few pages. This is, perhaps, just as well; for this is the sort of writing at which Manning excels. I actually began to feel that this trilogy was a bit too cramped. I began to long for the large cast of characters and rich pageant of The Balkan Trilogy. So, yes there's a war on here, and the sorts of horrific, madcap events that occur in a war are depicted here: One day you are out painting and your toddler son picks up a live hand grenade and is blown apart, you and your chummy batsman drive your jeep under a tree for a bit of tuck-in and he cops it as the jeep hits a land mine, a man arrives to tell a husband that the wife that he has thought dead for months is alive and well, waiting downstairs, a few weeks later that man himself dies of typhoid, and so on. One moment here, the next moment not. But what this book is really about is marriage and whether IT can be survived. Harriet's trials are quite harrowing and ring true. "I want more love than I am given - but where am I to find it?" she asks at one point. At another we find her desperately contemplating: She shook her head: `I don't know. But what does anyone see in anyone? Perhaps that's what Yeats meant by "love's bitter mystery"!' For those interested, the quote is from the poem "Who Goes with Fergus?" In the end, one gets the feeling that marriage, if possible, is something to be endured. Be all this as it may, the great thing about this trilogy - indeed, about all of Manning's writing - is her genius for description. Here, just at random, is her description of someplace between the Suez Canal and Damascus: "Sitting with the tarpaulin over her hair, she looked out on wild and empty hill country patched light and dark by the sun and cloud. On one side the sea, disturbed by the wind, rolled in on a desert shore. On the other were hills, rocky and bare except for the fur of grass. Black clouds and white clouds wound and unwound, sometimes revealing a stretch of clear blue sky. The rain slanted this way and that, cutting through broad rays of light, one moment pouring down, the next coming abruptly to a stop."

After seeing the DVD "Fortunes of War" I borrowed author Olivia Manning's "Balkan Trilogy" and "Levant Trilogy" from a friend. I was so caught up in the action that, had time allowed, I would have read all six at a sitting; now I am buying copies of both Trilogies to read at leisure. "The Danger Tree" is the first book in the Levant Trilogy, book four in the series that traces the fortunes and misfortunes of Guy and Harriet Pringle, arrived in Egypt as refugees from the war in Europe, having barely escaped from Athens. The book follows the course of the Desert War through the young, inexperienced British officer Simon Boulderstone, who is badly wounded. Guy, unfit for military service, is a lecturer with the British Arts Council. In Egpyt he can only get a commercial teaching job in Alexandria, Harriet works in the American Embassy in Cairo until the US entry to war and, as an alien, she has to find other work. Their separation puts a strain on their wartime marriage which was already under stress before they had to leave Greece. This can only be the barest outline of a complex, superbly written series on war, as experienced by civilians, and of selfishness and mediocrity when all are in peril (in the persons of the odius Dubedat, Lush and Professor Lord Pinkrose) triumphing over excellence as this unlovely trio also retreat from the advancing Germans. There is pathos, there is humour, there is the human condition in this, and the rest of the series which deserves to be, once more, in print, if only to alert those who know it not of the dreary uncertainties, fears and horrors of war.

Olivia Manning died in 1980, shortly after having written the last Coda of her LEVANT TRILOGY. One may consider that she had not the time to finish it. The Greek War Gods had in stock more than a "piece of cake" for Simon Boulderstone, on the island of Leros. After Italy's surrender, the British tried to seize the Italian Dodecanesus and convince the neighboring Turkey to enter WWII on Allies's side. Kos was occupied on Sept.13th, 1943, then Leros, Samos and Castelorizo fell also. But the Germans reacted immediately; paratroopers landed in Kos on Oct. 3 and the British reembarked the next day. Reinforced, Leros tried to repel the German assaults, to no avail, and the garrison withdrew on Nov. 16th Samos had been already evacuated by its temporary conquerors, who tried in vain to relieve the besieged Leros. Perhaps Olivia Manning had other plans for Simon, but her project died with her. What a pity! Source: Churchill's WAR MEMORIES, vol. 9.