Biography: In August, 1939, Olivia Manning married Reggie Smith in Marylebone Registrar's Office. Attending as witnesses were poet Stevie Smith, Manning's closest friend in pre-war London, and writer Walter Allen, through whom the couple had met.
Louis MacNeice, who taught Reggie Latin in Birmingham, the "Athens of the midlands", as they called it, was best man, his name appearing ignominiously on the marriage certificate as "Louise". The wedding was a rushed affair; war was on the horizon, and only nine days later, the same friends saw off the newlyweds on a train bound for Romania, where they would enter literary history as Guy and Harriet Pringle, protagonists of the magisterial Balkan and Levant novel trilogies.
The Pringles have not always pleased Manning's critics. "Bores in Bucharest, prize bores in Athens, and self-righteous prigs ever afterwards" was Alan Massie's succinct opinion. But they appeal to her readers, partly for their "real-life" interest, and partly for their more abstract resonance as political personalities. In the fragmenting landscapes of wartime, they are intensely meaningful, freighted with reference to Britain's blinkered relationship with Europe and the Middle East. Charming but philandering British Institute lecturer Guy Pringle doubles for a failing British left, affable but short-sighted and encumbered by outdated 1930s idealism; his wife Harriet is relentlessly disillusioned, unwilling to trust in marriage, in the war effort, in English literary myths of Cavafy's Greece or, with more than a little prescience, in western complacency about a subservient Egypt.
In her creator, the same incredulousness made for astute if sometimes unpleasant commentary. "The hook-nosed condor of the Middle East" was Lawrence Durrell's description of her, an apt image perhaps for a writer defined in this biography as "a shrewd and often obsessive observer". The chronology of Manning's life is a reminder, too, that much of her fiction spans a long gap between lived experience and composition. The manipulative post-war shaping of fortress Europe looms in the 16-year ellipsis between her departure from Romania and her return to it in her writing; she embarked on the trilogies in the year of Suez, continuing their progress against the backdrop of the Cold War. Harriet Pringle's recalcitrance is endorsed by subsequent events; her husband's free-thinking romanticism, like Reggie's communism, which faltered finally with the Soviet invasion of Hungary, rendered increasingly naïve.
The ability to perceive individuals caught up in history as ciphers both of its momentum and its implications places Manning among the greatest practitioners of 20th-century roman-fleuve. She looked frequently for support to similar constructions: Jocelyn Brooke's Orchid Trilogy, for example, or Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time sequence. In this respect the writer who understood her best, championing her work against critical agnosticism (and even, if Manning is to be believed, proposing marriage to her on the morning after his first wife's death), was Anthony Burgess, whose Malayan Trilogy also tackled the freefall of imperial collapse, foregrounding in comedy what Manning herself had written of more seriously as "the sorrow and terror of defeat".
If Manning's personality was germane to her political acuity, then so was her splintered nationality. She adopted the label "Anglo-Irish" as a kind of flag of convenience, agreeing with Elizabeth Bowen that "it made you feel grander", but she also spoke of her "mongrel" identity as the daughter of an Ulster Presbyterian mother and English naval officer father. Her strands of connections to the country were complex and it is difficult to know where she stood, in national terms. In her 1950 travel book on Ireland, The Dreaming Shore, she quoted from Casement's speech from the dock on the triumph of Irish hope over English authority, yet several early Irish-set short stories, together with her 1937 Irish civil war novel, The Wind Changes, are full of characters who resist, or would resist, such rhetoric. At best, the country seems to have functioned for her as a template for geopolitical insecurity, a road-map for international contradictions.
This memoir has a fragmented history: it was taken on after the deaths of its original authors, Neville and June Braybrooke, by the novelist Francis King, who has edited it with admirable sensitivity. The result is a very personal account of Manning, and although the sections on childhood and wartime are good, the book's balance is weighted towards later years in London, where Reggie drank and flirted and Manning fumed about perceived slights, poor reviews and the various "sixth-formers" jostling her for space on the literary pages. "Crowded rooms, parties, cats, Reggie, fury at the Booker Prize," Margaret Drabble summed it up.
The bitching is delightful. "Oh Iris, I do wish I could churn out novels like you," Manning sniped at Murdoch, remarking privately on how her rival's lank hair hung about her face as if cut by a hacksaw. But this only adds to the sharpness, the difficulty and at the same time, the spiritedness of a writer who emerges from both life and fiction as, quite simply, less deceived than those around her; paranoid perhaps, malicious certainly, but with a scepticism turned to extraordinary historical and imaginative purpose.
Eve Patten lectures in English at Trinity College, Dublin, and is currently researching the political context of Olivia Manning's fiction. Her book, Samuel Ferguson and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ireland, was recently published by Four Courts Press
Olivia Manning: A Life By Neville and June Braybrooke Chatto and Windus, 301pp. £20