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Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy Paperback – January 19, 2010

by Olivia Manning (Author), Rachel Cusk (Introduction)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 441 ratings
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The Balkan Trilogy is the story of a marriage and of a war, a vast, teeming, and complex masterpiece in which Olivia Manning brings the uncertainty and adventure of civilian existence under political and military siege to vibrant life. Manning’s focus is not the battlefield but the café and kitchen, the bedroom and street, the fabric of the everyday world that has been irrevocably changed by war, yet remains unchanged.

At the heart of the trilogy are newlyweds Guy and Harriet Pringle, who arrive in Bucharest—the so-called Paris of the East—in the fall of 1939, just weeks after the German invasion of Poland. Guy, an Englishman teaching at the university, is as wantonly gregarious as his wife is introverted, and Harriet is shocked to discover that she must share her adored husband with a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. Other surprises follow: Romania joins the Axis, and before long German soldiers overrun the capital. The Pringles flee south to Greece, part of a group of refugees made up of White Russians, journalists, con artists, and dignitaries. In Athens, however, the couple will face a new challenge of their own, as great in its way as the still-expanding theater of war.
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  1. Print length
    944 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    NYRB Classics
  4. Publication date
    January 19, 2010
  5. Dimensions
    4.99 x 1.7 x 7.94 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1590173317
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1590173312
  8. See all details
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  1. Those who give too much are always expected to give more, and blamed when they reach the point of refusal.
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  2. Reflecting on the process of involvement and disenchantment which was marriage, she thought that one entered it unsuspecting and, unsuspecting, found one was trapped in it.
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  3. She would have hesitated, thinking the net of his affections too widely spread to hold the weighty accompaniment of marriage.
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Editorial Reviews

Review

One of the "Five Best of World War II Fiction" — Antony Beevor, The Wall Street Journal

"Books not nearly as good are touted as definitive portraits of the war; very little on a best-seller list is more readable. Manning's giant six-volume effort is one of those combinations of soap opera and literature that are so rare you'd think it would meet the conditions of two kinds of audiences: those after what the trade calls 'a good read,' and those who want something more." --Howard Moss, The New York Review of Books

"The Balkan Trilogy: A fantastically tart and readable account of life in eastern Europe at the start of the war. The follow-up Levant Trilogy is just as good, too." --Sarah Waters

“Dramatic, comic and entirely absorbing.” —Carmen Callil

"I shall be surprised, and, I must admit, dismayed if the whole work is not recognized as a major achievement in the English novel since the war. Certainly it is an astonishing recreation." --Walter Allen, The New York Times

"The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City, and Friends and Heroes comprise a remarkable impression of traumatic world events as they impinged on the daily lives of (mostly) British permanent or temporary expatriates, encountered...[Manning] writes with blessed economy, evoking the sights and smells of the Middle East, the spring-green deserts and a mosque at dawn, with beautiful precision rather than purple passages...She has been compared with Graham Greene and Anthony Powell. Anthony Burgess, who thinks the two trilogies may prove to be the 'finest fictional record of the war produced by a British writer,' finds in her a kinship with Tolstoy." --Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times

"Her gallery of personages is huge, her scene painting superb, her pathos controlled, her humour quiet and civilized." --Anthony Burgess

"Miss Manning is one of the very best of our novelists. She has a voice of her own." --Pamela Hansford Johnson, The New York Times

"So glittering is the overall parade...and so entertaining the surface that the trilogy remains excitingly vivid: it amuses, it diverts and it informs'." --Frederick Raphael 

"Neither eye nor ear nor memory has failed the author. She has reproduced, in the atmosphere of wartime Rumania, exactly that miasma compounded of bravado and fear, extravagance and hunger, pretense and anguish, chicanery and stoicism, which hung over all the little, rumor-ridden capitals before their doom."--V. Peterson, The New York Times

About the Author

Olivia Manning (1908–1980) was born in Portsmouth, England, and spent much of her childhood in Northern Ireland. Her father, Oliver, was a penniless British sailor who rose to become a naval commander, and her mother, Olivia, had a prosperous Anglo-Irish background. Manning trained as a painter at the Portsmouth School of Art, then moved to London and turned to writing. She published her first novel under her own name in 1938 (she had published several potboilers in a local paper under the name Jacob Morrow while a teenager). The next year she married R.D. “Reggie” Smith, and the couple moved to Romania, where Smith was employed by the British Council. During World War II , the couple fled before the Nazi advance, first to Greece and then to Jerusalem, where they lived until the end of the war. Manning wrote several novels during the 1950s, but her first real success as a novelist was The Great Fortune (1960), the first of six books concerning Guy and Harriet Pringle, whose wartime experiences and troubled marriage echoed that of the diffident Manning and her gregarious husband. In the 1980s these novels were collected in two volumes, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, known collectively as Fortunes of War. In addition to her novels, Manning wrote essays and criticism, history, a screenplay, and a book about Burmese and Siamese cats. She was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1976, and died four years later.

Rachel Cusk is the author of seven novels and two works of non-fiction. She teaches creative writing at Kingston University, London.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ NYRB Classics (January 19, 2010)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 944 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1590173317
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1590173312
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.91 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.99 x 1.7 x 7.94 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 441 ratings

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Olivia Manning

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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
441 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

John Stults
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing the British won WWII
Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2023
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I wont include spoilers nor repeat story items (mostly) from other reviewers, This an amazing three novel story of Guy and Harriet Pringle starting out in Bucharest moving to Athens and then finally Cairo. The three novels are The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City and Friends and Heroes. While their world seems to crumble around them (they dont realize this) Guy especially totally ignores his wife to for instance to put on an amateur Shakespeare play (and later in Athens a review for the RAF crews. One can see why Hitler and yes Stalin did as well as they did -- one character moaning about their poor selection of food moans that Britain ought to surrender since it does not matter who is in charge anyway. (So let the devil rule as long as I have my tea and crumpets. Given this attitude from the British upper and intellectual class one sees the remarkable achievements of Churchill in rallying the British people. The author indicates this is based on her own experiences in the Balkans at this time and she follows this up with another trilogy of the same characters (I think) in the desert during WWII. Interesting book and a good display of the culture at the time.
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Blue in Washington (Barry Ballow)
4.0 out of 5 stars British expats caught in the opening of WWII
Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2010
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The British author of "Fortunes of War", Olivia Manning, produced this massive saga (three separate books) after living through the opening of WWII in Romania, where her husband was teaching English literature for the British Council; and later as the two became refugees in Greece.. The autobiographic novel impressively evokes the expectant and eventually, paranoid, living environment as the Nazis were gradually closing in politically and militarily on the states of the Balkans. Manning's story succeeds best when it describes the environment of the times and places that are its context. It is less successful when it looks (seemingly endlessly, at times) at the state of the marriage of the book's two principal characters, Harriet and Guy Pringle. Whether the author is being self-critical or making a comment about the nature of the British character in general, she gives the reader little reason to feel sympathy for many of the long parade of characters that inhabit the three sections of this novel. She apparently witnessed little human nobility in her own WW II adventures, but must have seen plenty of self-absorption, venality and petty jealously. In any event, there is no scarcity of these sins in "Fortunes..."

There are some wonderful observations about war and humans under stress to be found here. Pondering her status as a refugee in Greece--a place that she is quite taken with, but cannot really enjoy--Harriet Pringle concludes that "War meant a perpetual postponement of life..." It also means continual hunger and fear. Manning documents these realities brilliantly throughout the story.

Overall, this weighty tale is worth taking on because of its evocation of the period's realities. The less than stellar personal qualities and behavior of the book's characters must be endured to enjoy the better parts. There is one possible exception in the person of Prince Yakimov, a Russian-Irish Brit, who is an inveterate mooch, but also instinctive survivor. The self-pitying Yakimov brings both humor and pathos thats keeps the saga from becoming too leaden and otherwise completely unsympathetic, at strategic moments.

This isn't a book for everyone. But if you are tolerant of having to mine for small flecks of gold and occasional nuggets, it's worth the effort.
38 people found this helpful
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M. Feldman
5.0 out of 5 stars Civilians in the midst
Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2014
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Reading The Balkan Trilogy has been a summer's undertaking, but it has been worth it. Set in two countries, Romania and Greece, that are, at least in the beginning, on the margins of war, it recreates a time when news, the kind we know through television, newspapers, and the Internet, was completely unavailable. What is happening in Poland, in England, in France as the war expands comes only as scraps of information and panicky rumor. The story is told in the voice of Harriet Pringle, an observant young British woman newly married to the gregarious Guy, who leaves her alone to make her own friends and to ponder what kind of man she has married.

This is a novel of air raids and food shortages, but it is also a novel that evokes the particular beauty of pre-war Bucharest and pre-war Athens. As the novel progresses, one becomes familiar with the names of cafes and parks, hotels and apartment buildings., markets and restaurants. There are some wonderful characters: the down-on-his-luck Prince Yakimov, with his precious fur-lined greatcoat; the Jewish teenager Sasha, who is hidden by the Pringles; the myopic scholar Lord Pinkrose; and many others.

Ignore the condescending book jacket blurb about the book being a combination "of soap opera and literature." This must, I take it, refer to the novel's being the story of a difficult marriage, but there is nothing soap-opera like about the doubts Harriet has about the state of her marriage or about her attraction to a young military officer. This thread of the novel is matter of fact in tone, and since the novel is semi-autobiographical, a reader senses that this is, in fact, the way things were. A novel like Wouk's War and Remembrance is much more in the soap opera line.

The Balkan Trilogy will repay the time you set aside to read it, and it will give you a good sense of what war is like for the ordinary people who must "carry on" living their lives.

M/ Feldman
5 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Noseinabook
5.0 out of 5 stars Absorbing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 18, 2013
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Whatever qualifies a book as being a "Good Read", this has it in spades. Eastern Europe in the period just before the outbreak of WW2. Carachters that we have time to get to know and care about and whoes situation is even more dangerous than they realise. One of those books that you try to ration as you do not want to part company with these people. A small thing I suppose, but this is a pleasing edition of the book, a pleasure to handle.
5 people found this helpful
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G Hearnden
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 4, 2017
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Excellent read. Very long but brings out the characters in detail.
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Mrs. Simone B. Nelson
5.0 out of 5 stars Life in Europe during the war
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 16, 2016
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Fascinating tale of people/academics caught up in the outbreak of the last war in Europe. Despite the 900 plus pages I almost could not put it down!
One person found this helpful
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JuliaB
3.0 out of 5 stars Quality of the print of the print is unacceptable
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 24, 2015
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I bought this book on the basis of reading a sample on the enticement to 'look inside'. The sample is not a fair representation of the quality of the text; the introduction is in a lovely clear crisp typeface though I am facing a challenge with the actual body of the novel. Hope the novel will be worth it!
4 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
1.0 out of 5 stars Lin09
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 14, 2019
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My husband did not enjoy this. Was disappointed as Mastermind champion won contest on answering questions about it??
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