Open Writing

Considered to be one of the finest accounts of the war in the Middle East, written by an Englishwoman, these books give an insider’s view of life in the Balkans and the Levant immediately prior to, and during, the Second World War.

Olivia Manning was married to R D Manning (Reggie) and she takes as the framework for her story two fictional characters, Harriet and Guy, basing them broadly on herself and her husband. The Balkan Trilogy begins with a rather unworldly girl’s first steps into an unfamiliar environment when she unwillingly follows her husband to Romania a few months before the start of the war. He is a teacher of English at the British Council in Bucharest and her introduction to Balkan society rapidly opens her eyes to the corruption of King Carol’s II reign and the laxness of the populace. Shortly after the Germans enter Romania, the couple finally manage to escape via Greece to Egypt.

The first book is “The Balkan Trilogy” where the central character and her husband are living in Rumania just prior to WW2. It is very evocative and interesting, and although it is fiction, the author and her husband also lived in Bucharest at the time, when he was working for the British Council, and is clearly written from personal experience. The scenes set in Bucharest are give an unusual insight into an almost forgotten aspect of the European conflict from personal experience.

The follow-up “The Levant Trilogy”, continues the adventures of Harriet and her husband Guy as unwilling refugees in Egypt, having escaped from Greece shortly before the German invasion and is a brilliant evocation of a time and place. It is beautifully written, with lots of local colour, and gives a vivid idea of wartime Cairo; the frenetic search for love, life and laughter by the soldiers on their way to war and the women they left behind. The depiction of an Englishwoman’s first sight of the Pyramids is fascinating, while the account of the young English Army officer’s first impressions of the Alamein campaign and the fighting in the Western Desert must have been taken from personal impressions or war diaries. It is striking in its verisimilitude.

A TV series was made of the novels by the BBC with Emma Thomson and Kenneth Branagh in the leads and to my surprise, on reading Alan Bennett’s excellent book ‘Writing Home’ [more about that later] he mentions that he collaborated on this production. I would certainly enjoy seeing the series again – it was excellent.