Back to the Classics 2021 #7

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

A classic by a woman author. This is the second volume of The Balkan Trilogy, with the backdrop of the most destructive war in history. In January 2020 some friends gave me this trilogy for a get-well present when I was recovering from getting my chest sawn open. A review of the first novel, The Great Fortune, has been posted for this challenge.

The Spoilt City – Olivia Manning

In their early twenties, Guy and Harriet Pringle ought to be having the time of their lives living and teaching in Romania. The terrible problem is that it is 1940 when they are living and teaching in Romania. France has fallen so Romania’s allies are hard-pressed, putting Britons like Guy and Harriet in a precarious position. The fascist Iron Guard is pressuring the King to ally with Nazi Germany. At Hitler’s behest, Romania has made territorial concessions to Hungary. It is also sending oil and food to Germany, causing shortages. These polices have frightened and angered the people.

So basically this is a novel about the tumultuous events of the 20^th century that made ordinary people struggle for survival amidst war and rumors of war while dealing with the challenges of living in a tense society and staying reliable in work, love and relationships. In plain prose, Manning shows a society coming apart at the seams in incidents that are funny, sad, and awful.

As is inevitable in overseas life but even moreso in unstable times, the other expatriates leave and their circle of friends and rivals gets smaller and smaller. The comic character Yakimov acts in his typically spineless way and flees to Athens in the middle of the night.  Toby Lush and Dubedat, other English teachers, are gutless enough to run away to Athens too.

As everybody has to deal with meatless days and constant demonstrations, it dawns on Harriet that having fled the provincial town in England where she was raised in loveless house, she had ended up overseas in a place just as insular and narrow though it is a capital city. She also realizes what kind of guy she married in Guy. He is frank, charming, gregarious, giving but taken together these qualities constitute his way of managing people. He dreads asserting himself in confrontations, leaving Harriet, whom he thinks is tough, to play the hard guy when needed. And she is needed to deal with a parasite like Prince Yakimov, who has parked himself in their flat, and a displaced person they are sheltering, Sasha, a teenaged deserter brutalized by anti-semites in the army.

In the first novel of the trilogy, the climax was a cultural event, the production of Troilus and Cressida. In this one, considering the scare stories, arrests, demonstrations, it is an even more absurd event. The egotistical Lord Pinkrose has been invited to deliver a lecture on poetry from Chaucer to Tennyson, which is supposed to have a positive effect on Romanian foreign policy toward Great Britain.

I found persuasive Manning’s portrayal of a culture that is disintegrating. Nothing is certain for anybody in this novel. They feel uncertainty over the economy, jobs, finances, food supply and relationships. Sasha, a child, and Yakimov, a scrounger,  are only too happy to cede their freedom and dignity in exchange to feel safe and taken care of. But everybody feels enough fear and uncertainty to be always experiencing at least a simmering level of stress, frustration, and powerlessness over the direction of their lives and the future of the country. 

Indeed, in these pandemical days we readers ought to connect pretty easily with the atmosphere of this novel.