Back to the Classics Challenge 2021 #20

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

Classic by a Woman: This is the last novel in the Balkan Trilogy. For this challenge, I read the first two, The Great Fortune and The Spoilt City.

Friends and Heroes - Olivia Manning

Our main characters Guy and Harriet Pringle have been forced to flee Bucharest for Athens in October 1940. Doing so, they catch up with acquaintances like the sponger Prince Yakimov, a brilliant comic character. They also meet again Lord Pinkrose, Toby Lush and Dubedat, all main chancers who talk smack about Guy to everyone they meet. Guy is too high-minded to defend himself. He hangs out with users like Ben Phipps and produces big revues to entertain the troops. Keeping constantly busy with other people is Guy’s way of distracting himself from introspection and anxiety.

Extroverted, giving, and talkative, Guy deals with people by moving toward them. People think he is wonderful, a saint. Unloved child Harriet is introverted, envious of Guy’s winning ways with people, but needing his attention very badly, hurt and angry that she's the only person he doesn't try to charm. Harriet’s default with people is moving away from them and when her or Guy’s interests are threatened she moves against them. Both have the self-centeredness of youth – she is only 21 and he only a bit older. But Harriet, on her own too much while energetic Guy gives all he’s got to others, gets infuriated by obtuse Guy’s selfishness and socializing and contemplates an affair with an English officer, also very young.

One can’t help taking sides so through most of the book, through gritted teeth we readers are urging Harriet to dump the chump but we know full-well that they belong to the generation that believes marriage is for the duration – till death do us part. It’s true that without becoming the trailing spouse, she never would have had the expatriate experience. But who expects food shortages, stress, uncertainty and the threat of invasion as part of the overseas experience? Isn’t marriage tough enough when you’re just starting out - in a foreign country, no less - than to have to be reminded that you and scores of others might be vaporized in an air raid?

It’s worth reading on various levels. As social history, it chronicles expatriate life in a troubled place and time: Athens in the months before the invasion of Allied Greece by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in April 1941. As fictionalized memoir, the novel examines a discontented couple who married too young and their damaged friends, all living under the pressures of a stressed culture and rumors of war.

As cultural critique, the books asks how does a culture produce messed-up people such as Clarence Lawson, Charles Warden and toadies Toby Lush and Dubedat. Imagine how damaged children would be, raised by the self-centered Soames Forsyte or pitiless Charles Wilcox.