Customer Reviews

School for Love

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Anyone who appreciates superior writers, vivid characterizations and the intersection of history and literature and who has not yet discovered and read any of Olivia Manning's novels must rectify this omission. Of the highest recommendation is Manning's Balkan Trilogy, Levant Trilogy and "School for Love" as well as a fascinating biography about the author written and published after her death. From the Balkan Trilogy, the first novel ("The Great Fortune") is masterfully written. The BBC series based on the two trilogies (Fortunes of War, with Emma Thompson) is a treasure. The recent new edition of "School for Love" with a foreword by Jane Smiley is a must for readers and collectors of fine literature.

The sentimental-sounding title may be misleading; this is in fact a spare, psychologically astute novel of growing up. Felix Latimer, a young orphan left to the care of English expatriate Miss Bohun in wartime Jerusalem, struggles to derive some emotional sustenance from the intermittent attention paid to him by the older people around him, who get on with their own lives, pursuing objectives which he is still too young to fathom.

The leisurely pace with which Manning installs the details of the story immerses us in Felix's naive emotional world. His attempts to decrypt adults' conversations and win their favor often misfire, and only a housecat seems to repay his affection. Yet little by little, the reader watches a bleak and precisely rendered tale of frustrated loves unfold. Felix takes at face value manipulative conversational ventures which to the reader able to read between the lines will carry bitter messages about human nature.

The story Manning has to tell is a poignant one, offering no easy answers but a sensitivity to human dilemmas. The wartime situation (the characters are caught between the end of WW II in Europe and the outbreak of interconfessional war in the Holy Land) compounds the human tragedies, and there are a number of finely observed thumbnail portraits of actors from various sides. A touching and compelling work.

I wanted to read Manning's Balkan Trilogy, but figured I'd start with something shorter. Very glad I did. This strange, quiet book ambles on in a leisurely fashion and yet, I couldn't put it down. The story of an isolated boy at the end of WWII, sent to Jerusalem to await passage back to England, School for Love is a haunting meditation on loneliness. It also contains one of the great monsters in fiction, the boy's hapless landlady, a religious fanatic whose ruthless thrift destroys several lives. The novel has a powerful and surprising ending that stayed with me for days.

Story sounded interesting but I was not as fond of it as I had thought I would be. Doesn't mean anyone else wouldn't find it interesting.