Levant Trilogy [Paperback]

Olivia Manning (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2003

As Rommel advances in wartorn Egypt, the lives of the civilian population come under threat. One such couple are Guy and Harriet Pringle, who have escaped the war in Europe only to find the conflict once more on their doorstep, providing a volatile backdrop to their own personal battles. The civilian world meets the military through the figure of Simon Boulderstone, a young army officer who will witness the tragedy and tension of war on the frontier at first hand. An outstanding author of wartime fiction, Olivia Manning brilliantly evokes here the world of the Levant - Egypt, Jerusalem and Syria - with perception and subtlety, humour and humanity.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Olivia Manning was the author of more than twelve novels including The Balkan Trilogy, The Doves of Venus, The Playroom and the Remarkable Expedition. She was awarded the CBE in 1976 and died in 1980.

Product Details

• Paperback: 592 pages
• Publisher: Phoenix Paperbacks (August 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0753808188
• ISBN-13: 978-0753808184
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 1.5 x 7.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #290,539 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Book of Part Four, Fortunes of War, May 16, 2006

By 

Joanna Mountford (Cascade, (n/a) Trinidad and Tobago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Levant Trilogy (Paperback)

After seeing the DVD "Fortunes of War" I borrowed author Olivia Manning's "Balkan Trilogy" and "Levant Trilogy" from a friend. I was so caught up in the action that, had time allowed, I would have read all six at a sitting; now I am buying copies of both Trilogies to read at leisure.
"The Danger Tree" is the first book in the Levant Trilogy, book four in the series that traces the fortunes and misfortunes of Guy and Harriet Pringle, arrived in Egypt as refugees from the war in Europe, having barely escaped from Athens. The book follows the course of the Desert War through the young, inexperienced British officer Simon Boulderstone, who is badly wounded.
Guy, unfit for military service, is a lecturer with the British Arts Council. In Egpyt he can only get a commercial teaching job in Alexandria, Harriet works in the American Embassy in Cairo until the US entry to war and, as an alien, she has to find other work. Their separation puts a strain on their wartime marriage which was already under stress before they had to leave Greece.
This can only be the barest outline of a complex, superbly written series on war, as experienced by civilians, and of selfishness and mediocrity when all are in peril (in the persons of the odius Dubedat, Lush and Professor Lord Pinkrose) triumphing over excellence as this unlovely trio also retreat from the advancing Germans.
There is pathos, there is humour, there is the human condition in this, and the rest of the series which deserves to be, once more, in print, if only to alert those who know it not of the dreary uncertainties, fears and horrors of war.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Danger Tree depicts the human flotsam of war, March 4, 2010

By 

Daniel Berger (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Levant Trilogy (Paperback)

The Danger Tree is the fourth of Olivia Manning's six-novel series following Guy and Harriet Pringle as World War II, which has now pushed them as refugees into Egypt.

What they find there is the flotsam of war. Refugees are pushed from place to place. People whose hold on life may not have been very strong to begin with are now scrambling just to survive. Rumors swirl of a German breakthrough to Cairo that could happen at any moment. Little real news from the front gets through, and meanwhile panicky people are heading for Jerusalem or points further away from the Germans.

Manning captures a pervasive seediness among the marginal characters who surround the Pringles, rats figuring out when to scurry from this maybe-sinking ship. Guy Pringle, as ever, is too wrapped up in his work and too good-hearted. He's someone who thrives on human contact and so befriends every needy person seeing in him a safe haven. Meanwhile, he neglects Harriet, who is lonely in Cairo, having neither career, family nor social position to fall back upon, and only a shaky temp job at the American Embassy, where she'll soon be replaced by Americans now en route. She sees how people use Guy and how his dreamy idealism keeps him from seeing that himself.

Manning introduces a new character, young British officer Simon Boulderstone, newly posted to a disorganized army trying to stiffen its resistance and stop Rommel's rout of them. Socially segregated as a junior officer, both from superior officers above and from enlisted men below, he is lonely. He wonders if he can ever link up with his brother, stationed somewhere in the vicinity. And although newly married, he is dazzled by his brother's girlfriend whom he meets back in Cairo.

Manning's Army scenes convey little sense of military purpose. Boulderstone receives no orientation; no one tells him anything. His unit receives vague orders with no way to implement them, and his commanding officer covers his own ignorance and inexperience by keeping a gruff distance. It sometimes seems more like a Monty Python parody of Army life - "just muddle through" taken to extremes that would be comic if they weren't so depressing. On the other hand, Manning isn't writing an action novel here. Perhaps for the British Army at this low point, before El Alamein, this conveys something of what put them on the ropes in the first place.

She imputes female psyches to the men, whom she sees as craving intimacy and silently obsessed with who is friends with whom. Is this a side of combat that doesn't usually get written, but needs to be? Or is she a woman writing unrealistically about a man's world?

Boulderstone is at first crushed when separated from two men he bunked with on the long voyage from England around the Cape and finds another soldier having the same experience. Manning hints at a fair amount of submerged homosexuality - she never uses the word, but her meaning is clear - among both the civilian and military men here. (No members of the girls club, however.) An actor-now-soldier is a bit too devastated at the death of a comrade, and transfers his attentions to Guy, ignoring Harriet in the process. Men pair off, in the field or in the city, with suggestions of not-just-friends lurking underneath. Men cavort at all-male parties on a Nile houseboat.
There is a real sense of decay about the fringe arty, lefty people surrounding the Pringles. One sees the art and politics as the posturing of people otherwise failing in life, people who, when the chips are down, look out only for themselves.

Manning does a great job give us a slice of life in the Cairo émigré milieu at this time, without resorting to stereotypes. The boozing. The many casual and fleeting contacts of war. The annoying Americans, newly entered in the war. The decadence that war amplifies and that induces even more Egyptian contempt of the English. British class tensions transferred to an exotic but filthy place. The high life of socialites whose privileged world now shakes, and what sadness may lurk behind the merriment. The ambitions of working girls hoping to land an officer as a husband. The miserable life of the teeming Egyptian poor. And the animosity of Egypt's better classes who can't wait for the British to leave and wouldn't half mind if they were pushed out by the Germans. With their world teetering, the Pringles seek to hang on and to keep their lives together.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars excellent, January 28, 2010

By 

Marita (USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Levant Trilogy (Paperback)

I loved both the Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy. I was sorry when I got to the end and still wished for more, despite the considerable length of what amounts to 6 sequential novels. These novels are wonderful for the high quality of the writing, the sharp insight into long-term marriage, friendships and other types of relationships, for the large range of characters, for the exotic settings in Rumania, Greece, Egypt, and other parts of the Middle East, and for the unusual perspective on living through WW II. The story is told mostly from the edges of the conflict rather than the battlefield, although the Levant Trilogy does have some very compelling parts set in the desert battlefields of North Africa. I am sorry that this excellent writer is, for the most part, no longer in print. It's well worth the trouble to seek out her books!