Desert detour

This week I have attended introductory sessions for a couple of other newsletter services, and will probably switch to one shortly. I notice that one of the bigger Substack accounts, Platformer, is attempting to put pressure on the leadership to change their ways, so I’m curious to see what happens with that.

When I started this newsletter, I mentioned that although it mostly involves stories set in cold places, I would at some point take a detour into the desert. Since it’s 16 degrees here in Burlington this morning, this feels like a good time to make good on this promise.

Last year I finally read Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War. I saw the TV series based on the books back in 1987, when I was a senior in high school, and always intended to read them. I may have been a bit daunted by their length. The first part, The Balkan Trilogy, comes in at 944 pages; The Levant Trilogy a more reasonable 576. I knew if I read one, I would feel compelled to finish the other, though together they vied with War and Peace for doorstopper supremacy. What I did not know before I read them that they contained so much suspense via dramatic irony that I could finish the first trilogy in a week.

Manning got married to her husband Reggie Smith in the summer of 1939, and followed him to Romania a few weeks afterward. Fortunes of War is a very lightly fictionalized account of the couple’s travails in the Balkans and Egypt. WWII was declared the day Manning and her husband boarded the train for Bucharest, and the same happens to the couple in the books—the Pringles, as they are called in the text. Reggie Smith worked for the British Council; so does Guy Pringle. And the thing about working for the British Council in Bucharest circa 1940 was that you had an exaggerated sense of the cultural and moral purpose of your stay in the country, with absolutely no military means to protect it. Pringle chooses to remain at his post long after he should have left, when Romania’s local fascists, the Iron Guard, were marching in the streets and smashing in the windows of his workplace. The book cultivates an extraordinary sense of danger, with nail-bitingly close scenes of much-delayed escape. When the Pringles do finally leave Romania, they end up in Greece, which is invaded first by Italians and then by the Nazis. By the end of their sojourn in the country, the Pringles have six hours to get out of Athens before German tanks enter the streets.

The Pringles make it to Egypt, on what must be the very last ship leaving Greece. Yet they are not out of danger, because battle rages in the desert of neighboring Libya, the fighting constantly threatening to spill over the border. When Manning lived in Alexandria, she was subjected to multiple air raids, so many that she decamped to Cairo—a city she disliked intensely.

Until I did a bit more research on Manning, connected to reading the books, I didn’t realize how much her life dovetailed with that of another novelist, Lawrence Durrell. Durrell was also working for the British Council in Greece, and also evacuated to Egypt. For a time, he worked as a press secretary for the British embassy in Cairo, while Manning did the same job for the Americans. By all accounts, they knew each other fairly well and did not like each other very much!

I became interested in Durrell as a teenager, after reading the books of his brother Gerald, who founded the zoo on the Isle of Jersey. I have several cousins who grew up on the island, and one of them gave me a copy of My Family and Other Animals, about his days as a budding naturalist in Corfu. The descriptions of Lawrence in its pages made an impression. I went on to read The Alexandria Quartet around the same time I was watching Fortunes of War every week, without seeing much of a connection. I remember almost everything about the TV series, and almost nothing about the quartet of books, apart from one wildly sexist detail. So that may be the reason I favor Olivia, in their rivalry.

Manning’s work doesn’t have very much to do with Scandinavian crime, but I can’t mention what I’ve been reading lately without bringing up the immense sense of closure I received on finishing this set of books I’ve been wanting to read since I was seventeen.

I also have the feeling that when I do move my newsletter, its focus will widen.