It’s the return of Guy and Harriet Pringle. Olivia Manning’s The Levant Trilogy picks up where her brilliant The Balkan Trilogy leaves off. The Pringles, a married young couple, arrive in Egypt after escaping from Nazi-occupied Greece in the middle of World War II. One obvious thing from the start is that they haven’t changed and their relationship continues to drift aimlessly like it has all along.
After their arrival in Cairo, Guy gets his dream job, working for the colonial British Legation as the director of an English department. Harriet also goes to work at the American embassy. They get put up in an apartment building supplied by the British embassy with rooms for U.K. expatriates. Harriet’s social life revolves around the residents there while Guy continues on living a separate existence with his group of friends who are considered to be bums by most people’s estimates. The two groups get connected through an unlikely coupling of Harriet’s erratic friend Angela and Guy’s alcoholic friend Castlebar.
Also a subplot gets introduced with Simon, a young English military officer who has just arrived in Egypt. Rommel’s forces are progressing across North Africa towards the Suez Canal and the Allies fight them off. Simon is ambitious, vowing to revenge the death of his brother until he gets injured and forced to spend time under medical care in Cairo. That is where he develops a friendship with Guy Pringle. Psychologically, Simon goes through a process of confronting the ephemeral nature of life during wartime and the often unpredictable loss of the people around him.
While The Levant Trilogy is not specifically about gender roles, there is an obvious and overriding preoccupation with the gulf between men and women throughout the narrative. With the exceptions of Simon and the kindly bachelor Dobson, the colonial bureaucrat working at the British embassy, the men in this book are portrayed as being selfish and self-absorbed. Guy’s group of heavy drinking friends are crude and irresponsible. Harriet’s friend Edwina also chases after men who use her and then abandon her. Even the Egyptian natives treat women as if women are not intelligent enough to understand the intellectual world of men.
Guy is at the center of all this. While Harriet makes every effort she can to spend time with him, he routinely ignores her, treats her like she is less important than his job and his peers, and even refuses to take day trips to the pyramids and other sites which he thinks of as tacky and of trivial importance. Later in the book, when Guy mistakenly thinks Harriet has died, Edwina tries to win his heart and asks him out to dinner. She dresses up in her most elegant clothes and Guy insists on going to a grubby, low class restaurant because he knows his friends will be there. Without even realizing that Edwina is putting the moves on him, he abandons her, leaving her to take a taxi home alone while Guy goes off to drink. The problem isn’t that Guy is cruel or heartless; he just doesn’t acknowledge that women are anything other than ornaments or pets. Guy’s vision is flawed, literally and symbolically. He wears glasses because of near-sightedness, but he is also myopic in his outlook on life. He often can not see the obvious or what is right in front of his face. The bigger picture always seems to elude his recognition. Even his optimism is naive and unnerving to the point where Harrier sometimes worries about his safety.
Guy isn’t entirely bad either. He goes out of his way to help anybody in need. His dedication to helping the downtrodden is admirable to a fault since he is unable to see that the people he helps are merely using him, usually to get meals or, more importantly, alcohol. But Guy shows what he is capable of in his friendship with Simon, offering him unconditional emotional support during his recovery from his injury. Despite all of Guy’s maddening shortcomings, it is hard not to admire his good nature and good intentions. This is the kind of nuanced characterization that makes Olivia Mannin’g work so powerful.
On other the other hand, everything wrong with Guy’s relationship to Harriet is signified by the brooch that Angela gives to Harriet as a gift. The diamond-studded heart design looks gaudy to Guy who takes it away from Harriet, telling her he wants to give to Edwina as a gift. When Harriet tells him she wants to keep it because it means something special to her, he tells her she doesn’t really want it anyways because it is so tacky. He has no consideration for her feelings or for his own conduct. This eventually leads to Harriet leaving him. Edwina later gives the brooch back to Guy, he puts it away and forgets about it and when he finds it again later, he can’t even remember where it came from. The brooch’s cycle of possession among the four people shows how oblivious he is to the presence and subjectivity of the women he associates with. To him, they are insubstantial, meaningless, and easy to forget.
Harriet gives up on Guy and leaves for destinations farther east. She heads off for Syria, meets up with Angela and Castlebar in Lebanon, and the three of them head off to Jerusalem. Guy mistakenly thinks Harriet has died and when she finds this out we learn that the separation causes the two of them to realize how much they love each other. Harriest also learns how to be more independent. The ending is more Victorian than Modern, leaving something to be desired and not entirely credible. It does provide closure to the whole saga though.
Like The Balkan Trilogy, the strongest point here is in the character building and the way the people interact. Almost through the use of dialogue along, each member of the story takes on a unique life of their own that stays consistent throughout the whole book. You can feel like you personally know each of them and it is easy to identify with Harriet, seeing the world through her eyes no matter what your gender may be. It is a portrait of a flawed humanity that gently reminds us that we need to accept people as they are and find a way to be comfortable with that. Harriet can not fix Guy’s ignorance, but she can find a way to deal with it and make the best of their imperfect relationship. Olivia Manning’s writing also makes it clear what it feels like to live in a male dominated world where women are seen but not heard and, most of the time, hardly even seen. And her writing never degenerates into bitterness or misanthropy. There is a certain kind of resignation to the characters’ imperfections, a certain kind of patience that reminds us of the need to tolerate people’s imperfections rather than wasting our lives trying to change people who don’t want to be changed.
Compared to The Balkan Trilogy, this was a little bit of a let down. In the previous novels, the encroaching Nazi menace that followed Guy and Harriet as they bumbled through life barely holding their marriage together made the whole narrative that much more unsettling. But here, while they reside in Cairo, the Nazis and the Allies fight off in the distance of the desert. While some passages depict Simon in combat, the story of Guy and Harriet continues on in its day to day routines while the war is little more than rumors and some distant noise in the background. There isn’t much dramatic tension between the two strands of the story line and that makes for some less exciting reading. Also, by replacing the subplot of the parasitical and unforgettable Yakimov with the subplot of Simon’s struggles, a lot of the tension in this second cycle of novelettes is lost as well.
The Levant Trilogy may be slightly less engaging than The Balkan Trilogy, but if you’ve read that one first, then The Levant Trilogy does a sufficient job of tying up the loose threads of Guy and Harriet’s marriage. If anything, if you are a male reader it will open your eyes to the way some women might see their marriages in a way that no other novel can. And if you are a woman, you might be able to relate. Of course, there are a lot of other themes in the book, but you just have to read it to experience it all. It is an easy book to read and understand; like Kurt Vonnegut said, “Writing something that is easy to read is the most difficult thing a writer can do.” Olivia Manning has mastered the art of writing something that is easy to follow without sacrificing depth, complexity, or insight. This is an excellent achievement.
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