“Guy needs a friend,” Harriet tells Dobson in Chapter Six of “The Danger Tree,” the first novel in “The Levant Trilogy,” where we find the same characters we met in “The Balkan Trilogy,” while introduced to new ones, too, as Harriet and Guy, a young English couple newlywed at the beginning of World War II, on the run from the invading Nazis, first from Bucharest then Athens, now find themselves in Cairo, in fear of having to run again as Rommel is rumored to be only hours away.
“Needs a friend! But no one has more friends.”
“There are friends and friends. There are those who want something from you and those who will do something for you. Guy has plenty of the first. He’s rather short of the second.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Yes. He collects depressives, neurotics and dotty people who think he’s the answer to their own inadequacy.”
“And is he?”
“No, there is no answer.”
p. 140, NYRB, 2014, first published 1982 as “The Levant Triology” by Penguin.
Later – alone, out of money, apart from Guy and adrift from Cairo into Syria, unable to find work, suspect and strange, following her rash escape, both deliberate and random, Harriet finds friends, and reflects,
“…she, an admirer of wit, intelligence and looks in a man, was beginning to realize that kindness, if you had the luck to find it, was an even more desirable quality” (497).
But is kindness alone enough?
“Lister was kind but, thinking of his fat, pink face, his ridiculous moustache, his wet eyes and baby nose, she told herself that kindness was not enough” (525).
Like Lister, many of Manning’s characters seem to walk on as if just out of a Shakespeare play. The critic Harold Bloom saddled Shakespeare with inventing the human. Shakespeare certainly made ample studies, having created well over a thousand characters in his plays. Manning too produces a host of characters, and while she doesn’t forge the human, she does fashion personality: quirks and tics, foibles and fears, motivations and enthusiasms – ways of being, but not always of one’s own choosing: why are we the way we are, and can we change? How do we make friends? How do we keep them? But none of Manning’s characters stand alone; they are each part of some social imbroglio: a picaresque duo; peasant families forced from their homes into refugee status; government administrators lost in corridors of bureaucracy; bosses and the bossed about; soldiers in lines marching off and stumbling back; colleagues and acquaintances and friends going to work, meeting in cafes for drinks or dinner, attending concerts or lectures, sightseeing, going on walks, always talking. Manning’s friends come together to join up and to disassemble, to get news, to ask questions, to criticize and admire, scold and berate, laugh and cry amid betrayals and sacrifices.
In the first book of the trilogies, “The Great Fortune,” Guy produces and directs a Shakespeare play. The whole enlarged endeavor is a sort of aside, meant to give the locals a respite from their anxiety over the war threatening near, but also to give the novel a subplot to view the interconnections of characters – their relationships, how they get along or not with one another, thrown together by chance and circumstance. The play is “Troilus and Cressida,” its amateur performance played once in Bucharest in 1940 a great success. But while just about everyone Guy knows has some part in the production, Harriett has no role to play but that of an observer.
In “Hamlet,” Shakespeare gives the bumbling Polonius the job of dispensing advice, now responsible for a litany of trite sayings repeated usually without knowing the questionable credibility of the speaker. A favorite of mine:
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
To grapple is to hook, as a grape plant does with its tendrils. But who wants to be grappled to someone else’s soul?
The second half of Polonius’s advice on friendship is usually dropped from the reference:
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new hatched unfledged comrade.
To be fledged is to be feathered for flight. How does one prepare for the flight of one’s friends?
Harriet and Guy’s friends jockey for position but more for survival. The loss of friendship becomes so common one seeks to avoid making new friends. This is the case with Simon Boulderstone, a British soldier in Egypt to fight in the desert war. Simon shares in alternating chapters with Harriet protagonist duties. He quickly loses the two Army friends he made on his way to Egypt. But he falls in with the tried and true buddy system, then loses a couple of good buddies. Simon learns one fights and dies not for one’s country but for one’s friends. He also learns friends that glitter often bleed lead.
Entangled in the theme of friendship is the theme of personality, how and why some are attracted to others while others are not, and may even be repelled. How and why relationships that start off so sweet often turn so sour and bitter. How and why some people have certain needs and wants that others readily cast off as useless burdens. How and why we use others in the guise of friendship then rid ourselves of them when the use grows obsolete. At the same time, we find friends who, as the saying goes, stick through the thick and thin, don’t abandon ship at the first sign of taking on water. In the end, we find Harriet and Guy the best of friends, which may mean putting up with one another’s spontaneous and fickle lack of friendship or having to entertain the friendship of others who if alone would not come close.
The Coming of the Toads 