The Balkan Trilogy
by Olivia Manning
Buy on AmazonA fine novel about a newly-married couple living in Bucharest in a war crazy Europe. Olivia Manning's books concentrate on the British expatriate community outside the charmed circle of the diplomats of the Legation: the rumours, the shortages, the terrors as friends and acquaintances disappear or are killed almost every week. The refugees, the Jews, the professional freebooter who make their home with the Pringles, the young married couple, even as Harriet feels her marriage under strain against the darker strain of war. A difficult read but a very rewarding one.
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"I think she was one of the very best novelists of the 20th century. These books, The Balkan Trilogy— and The Levant Trilogy— were her best pieces. What I found fascinating was all the drama of the Second World War in rather peripheral places. The drama and the feeling of the war were written against a background of a young couple who had just got married and who were very different in their outlook on life, and the problems of their marriage. Yes, she manages somehow to create what the wartime situation was. The British Council are portrayed as awful self-interested characters, hardly interested in the war itself. The couple are always picking up these helpless characters too, these stray cats of people and helping them along. She gets various jobs, putting out British information. There are a lot of reporters that pass through, rather like the reporters in Scoop . She takes a rather critical view of most people though; she’s not very kind, very objective. From time to time she’s emotionally involved with people, whereas Guy Pringle, the husband, is a hopeless bundle of love and left-wing sympathies."
Spies, Lies and Foreign Correspondents · fivebooks.com