The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Olivia Manning

  • Notes on Youssef Rakha’s “The Dissenters”

    I’m not long into Youssef Rakha’s “The Dissenters” before being reminded of Joyce’s cracked looking glass:

    – It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.

    But Stephen is able to think and express so as a result of his Jesuit training, a “wellfed” education, even while his family fortunes have ebbed:

    Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him.

    And the question, as Humpty Dumpty put it, is which is to be master: the fed or the unfed.

    – After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your own master, it seems to me.

    Stephen is in conversation with one of his roommates, Haines, an Englishman.

    – I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian.

    Still, surely we can think for ourselves, even with our poor or uneven educations? And where, after all, do we learn to think? And having mastered it, or enfolded it in fine arts, what do we think, and what do we think about what we think?

    – You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.

    – I can quite understand that, he [Haines] said calmly. An Irishman must think like that, I dare say. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.

    History. I recently read the “Fortunes of War” trilogies, “The Balkan Trilogy” and “The Levant Trilogy,” Olivia Manning’s collected novels set in World War II from the perspective of a British couple living in Bucharest then forced to move farther south in advance of the Nazi approach until they finally barely escape from Greece into Egypt and life in Cairo for the duration, and “Roman Year,” the Andre Aciman memoir of his family’s exile from Egypt to Italy, as a result of Nasser’s unfolding policies, where they attempt to settle in and live before relocating again to the US, and those readings now proved useful introductions to Rakha’s “The Dissenters.” But the first I read of Manning was her “School for Love,” which takes place in Jerusalem during the war, also an introduction now to the book at hand, “The Dissenters,” which in turn serves to see the Manning and Aciman books in different light.

    In the Aciman book, for example, we find Aunt Flora, who had moved to Rome two years earlier, “expelled from Alexandria” (27), correcting the writing style of the young Andre:

    “I didn’t tell her that I was typing letters to various American colleges. Aunt Flora had read my earlier drafts that week and said I was too poetic, too ethereal. I needed to have both feet on the ground. “There’s no room for your complicated, byzantine mannerisms in such letters – ‘I miss my homeland, what is my homeland, home is a metaphor,’” she mimicked, “none of that – I know your type” (215).

    I’m not sure if Flora is punning on type there. A typed letter hides all the clues a handwritten one might contain about the writer, and we rely on the typed letter’s style to reveal the sources of the writer’s mannerisms. And an epistolary novel allows for a freedom from both handwriting and typewriting, from thought bound by circumstantial rules of usage; the letter frees the author from expectations and whatever presupposed rules the reader might bring to impose on style.

    That letter to the world that never wrote to her, Emily Dickinson said – the letter is her world. A writer’s world of letters, a lighthouse.

    “May the house be mercy and light” (275, “The Dissenters”).

    What else can a mother hope for? At the end of a long day, decade…spouse, children…life. In which the mother is the country, the daughter those who left, emigrated and estranged, the son who turns to tell the tale in order to escape its meaning, “…past the time when I can build my personhood from scratch,” yet now free of “history and desire” (276).

    I’m not sure if it’s part of the novel or not, I think probably not, but “The Dissenters” book includes a “Timeline” (279) that begins with 1948 and ends with 2014. A good reading exercise might be to take that timeline and amend it with a like-brief description of what Mouna – well, to match Mouna’s situation, circumstances, at each stage of the timeline, for that’s essentially how the plot of “The Dissenters” works. For example, on page 82, Mubarak is stepping down, so we are in 2011, January 25-February 11, according to the Timeline. What’s Mouna doing? At first, I thought she was caught on television, but it’s one of Nour’s so-called “visions,” not something he sees on TV.

    “I whistle as I look up, ecstatic at her lack of headscarf. My mother is a movie star” (82).

    Then again, maybe the Timeline and the non-linear dates that serve as section titles are not all that necessary for the reader reading the book without a craving for – to know the real from the imagined. The “Jumpers,” for example. It took me awhile to realize this was the “Myth” referred to in the subtitle to the book, “Three Letters & a Myth.” At first I thought the jumpers were real, but I couldn’t remember anything from the news about them.

    “The Dissenters” blends political, family, religious, friendship, marriage circumstances for individuals with whatever everyday life they are bound up in or might for a host of reasons become unbound with something new always appearing just around the corner, and then the walk back, where one can neither don nor shed a hat without being accused of meaning something:

    “In the seventies the headscarf wasn’t as ubiquitous as it was to become, nor were we as attuned to immodesty” (28).

    The book might be somewhat confusing if one tries to read it solely as a history, particularly if looking for a linear timeline. And the book can make for somewhat daunting reading, like an overdose of nightly bad news. I was reminded in parts of Burroughs and “Naked Lunch,” of Poe’s stories, anecdotal dreamlike visions that reek of fantasy inspired by stress. You see or hear people laughing, but you either don’t get the humor or really it’s threadbare.

    At the same time, the writing is clear and concise, casual, the individual chapters often short, propelling, lots of white space, until you get to “A Vision of Lena” (107), two and a half pages of solid prose – and is it a letter too? No. And what of the chapters titled “White,” “Green,” “Red,” and their subtitles of individual names? More on the Jumpers, the “Myth,” where a few of the chapters are brief paragraphs. The reading is both easy and difficult.

    Nour is a journalist. Words are his trade:

    “None of this would be happening if words didn’t take up with her again. I can tell. Her life’s nomenclature changing anew” (86).

    Nour’s letters are to his sister, Shimo, expatted to California (but we never hear back from her), and are about their mother, Mouna, as Nour describes a history of her body and its changes, her attempts at control over herself, which parallel or compliment a history of the country. Mouna has tried antidepressants, or that was Amin, or both? (220). They have undone so many. No help.

    “Mouna had had plenty of opportunity to think about sanity and happiness, especially the connection between the two” (219).

    She loses weight, gains strength, and joins the marches. Nour is objective, a reporter, an observer:

    “Mubarak was bad and the revolution brought down Mubarak, but does it follow that the revolution is good?…

    Mass protest has restored Mouna to a fuller, feistier self and that’s a major achievement right there. But if things end up being the same or worse, soon or later Mouna too will feel bamboozled – her preeminent project predoomed – then who knows where she’ll go” (99).

    I was a bit confused by the Nour/Nimo partnership, relationship. (Shem and Shaun?) They are both journalists. But Mouna is also called Nimo. Maybe some of the letters might be read as reporter filed dispatches, field reports. We even get a sample of a story (101): “On July 28, 1963….” That chapter, by the way, contains a particularly satiric, ironic sex scene (105), if it can even be called that, in which we find another example of the picture one character has of another character is never the same picture that character has of themselves.

    Standing as one does, say waiting for a bus or sitting in a cafe, does the memory work sequentially? No, never. It jumps around, one thought to another, with no regard for links, yet something causes one thought to lead to another. Or no, just random. But it’s a novel, so one assumes some cause or reason for the back and forth. To be literary? To distinguish itself, the novel, from the history book? Then you get something like this:

    “It is midnight in Mohandessin by the time I settle into a kind of berth fashioned of the curvature at one end of the space. Frank Sinatra is warbling in the background…” (32).

    Alas, that’s it for Frank. And I wonder, yes, Sinatra, but what was he “warbling?” Were this a movie, we would know. Live at the Pyramids, 1979? “Someone to Watch Over Me.” And that curved booth – red naugahyde? The waitress in uniform? Shimo in California? This sounds like California:

    “Amin has invested the few hundred guineas’ inheritance his elder brother forked over in a house off Road 9 in Maadi – a whitewashed cube with a crescent-shaped veranda that looks like a beach chalet except taller. Like a signpost on the road to Helwan, it is the only residence within several kilometers’ radius. Who would’ve thought, looking at the spottily paved desert all around, that within ten years it will be first among equals and, within twenty, one of a handful remaining David’s resisting the goliath of apartment blocks replacing the villas and bungalows of Maadi’s original treed avenues?” (55).

    What we think about something when it happens changes over time, and in that sense, our current situation helps explain what we were like before we got here. That’s a bit tricky. If we reread a book today it’s likely not the same book we read yesterday.

    But it’s not a movie, and this is not a book review, just a few notes. “If anyone can understand this, honestly” (59). And of the house: “The truth is I’ve already put the house up for sale” (275). So it goes. “For a few weeks she was famous on the web” (213). “Mouna feels more and more dismayed and uncertain” (217). The reader may share the feeling. And of the writer?

    “As I draw close to the end of her story – the point at which you know as much as I do anyway – I’m convinced of my own irrelevance. A man smuggling one woman’s life into another’s, in words. Without really being part of either. Once the procedure is over, I am no more” (230).

    What could be worse, that of the book reviewer on a blog? Yet there is none more relevant than the reader.

    ~~~

    Youssef Rakha, “The Dissenters,” 2025, Graywolf Press.

    Andre Aciman, “Roman Year,” 2024, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

    James Joyce on Writing: “write dangerously”

    Notes on Youssef Rakha’s “The Crocodiles“

    Friendship in Olivia Manning’s Balkan and Levant Trilogies

    Notes on Olivia Manning’s “School for Love”

  • Friendship in Olivia Manning’s Balkan and Levant Trilogies

    “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.

  • On Talking

    Thinking back to my earlier days of blogging, when it now sometimes seems writers then often wrote with different purpose, as in sharing a conversation with themselves to which others might be invited to listen in and, if need be, comment. Have we stopped talking to ourselves? Some days these days I’m nearly the only person I talk to, so if I do talk to someone else, some random Q & A with a passerby or on a visit to the grocery, I’m likely to mull over what was said with playback on repeat. Too often I find myself looking for meaning in a bucket of refuse, wanting to rebuff the debris, worried I might have not given someone or something my full attention, mired in muddled memory. Of course my interlocutor is long gone and remembers none of it and would be surprised to know I have it on mental-virtual video. Talking to ourselves is where conversations begin. Where can they end? I suppose many prepare a speech or lecture or opinion or anecdote, or spurn the prep and just go for it, though most rarely press it, but one might in conversation attempt to lecture or tell a story of something that once happened and for some reason the links still work, but not all of them, or the links take you places unexpected, but what’s the purpose of a lecture, a one way conversation, or an anecdote impossible to research? Do casual conversations have purpose, or are they simply a template for one’s personality, a way of spraying one’s mental territory? After a decade and more, a blog full of broken links, difficult to refresh. And we lose purpose, or misplace it, or deleted it by accident.

    Olivia Manning’s writing is full of conversations. Characters come and go and return and you feel like you know not so much what they are going to say but how they are going to say it, and after a time there’s no difference. If the conversation contains nothing new, how something is said takes on more importance than what is said. But since it’s fiction, or selective memoir, everything that’s said must have some meaning, some purpose in the whole. Some reason for being said:

    “The evening was one of the few that they had spent in their living-room with its comfortless, functional furniture. The electric light was dim. Shut inside by the black-out curtains, Harriet mended clothes while Guy sat over his books, contemplating a lecture on the thesis: ‘A work of art must contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.’”

    “Who said that?” Harriet asked.

    “Coleridge.”

    “Does life contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise?”

    “If it doesn’t, nothing does.”

    “Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy.” NYRB 2010. Page 872.

    But is life a work of art?

    Critics have called Manning’s work somehow less than art. A blurb by Howard Moss on the back cover of my NYRB copy says,

    “One of those combinations of soap opera and literature that are so rare you’d think it would meet the conditions of two kinds of audiences: those after what the trade calls ‘a good read,’ and those who want something more.”

    You’d think that’s what a good conversation ought to purpose for. Why isn’t soap opera considered literature? It is, but one without an end – like a blog. Critics don’t like something that doesn’t come to an end. Someone that goes on and on and on is not considered a good conversationalist. But having enjoyed “The Balkan Trilogy” so much, I’m now on to the second of Manning’s trilogies, “The Levant Trilogy.” I’m only about 50 pages in, but already I think I can say it’s another good read mix of soap and lit. Though I’m not bothered by soap alone. Hemingway is full of soap. Soap and sap. Though the soap is rarely used for its purpose. The blurb was taken from a review of Manning’s Balkan and Levant trilogies Moss wrote for The New York Review, April 25, 1985, titled “Spoils of War.” Moss liked the books, almost in spite of his taste, it seems:

    “The way this past world comes to the surface is un-Proustian and non-metaphorical; the thrust of the whole rarely has time to stop for digressions. Manning, who avoids elevations of style as if an ascent were a bog, also evades sentimentality, and although she can handle atmosphere, her main interests are those two staples of realistic fiction, character and action.” 

    But we do find digressions in the Manning books, mostly in the form of colorful sensory and physical descriptions of the weather and its effects on the streets, parks and gardens, the mountains and valleys and the trains traversing under the sky above and above the people below. But while these descriptions are placed here and there frequently it’s true they are short and appear almost as doilies or tchotchkes arranged to create atmosphere. But in the end, for Howard Moss, the trilogies lack poetry. But a poetry of war might create illusions, and what would be its purpose? Moss has already said of Manning:

    “An enemy of illusions, she does not quite see how crucial they are both in love and in war.”

    Was it on purpose Manning avoided metaphor and poetry? We can take purpose too seriously, forgetting that mostly what’s said is said in jest, to fill the spaces of silence, or to scratch common itches. We usually proceed without purpose. In Alice, on purpose, we find:

    “They were obliged to have him with them,” the Mock Turtle said: “no wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.”

    “Wouldn’t it really?” said Alice in a tone of great surprise.

    “Of course not,” said the Mock Turtle: “why, if a fish came to me, and told me he was going a journey, I should say ‘With what porpoise?’”

    “Don’t you mean ‘purpose’?” said Alice.

    “I mean what I say,” the Mock Turtle replied in an offended tone. And the Gryphon added “Come, let’s hear some of your adventures.”

    “I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said Alice a little timidly: “but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

    “Explain all that,” said the Mock Turtle.

    “No, no! The adventures first,” said the Gryphon in an impatient tone: “explanations take such a dreadful time.”

    Indeed they do. Such might be to blog, or to write an epic trilogy or two, but while some explanations seem to require a long form, others can be riffed off in a tweet or two.

    We say “on purpose” to explain some experience wasn’t “by accident.” But purpose is confounded by all those imperatives upon us that determine how we feel and experience but are not within our control, like the medulla oblongata stuff. We might try to proceed with purpose to do something purposeful with our day, or at least with our writing, or our blog, but to what purpose other than to show what happened and how our feelings may have changed over time and what ideas if any might accrue from those changes. But if all we can show is pettiness, narrow-minded cheap anecdotes, or soap operatic epic-intended purpose or explanations that go nowhere, why bother wading through the bog of a blog or a trilogy of books, all of which can never ascend but only descend, down as the page rises and disappears, one post after another, more often than not style and sense on repeat, poetry or not? Speak Memory, Nabokov said, while others might say, “Shut up!” Memory is like an upstairs neighbor pounding on the floor.

    Memory is the editor-in-chief of experience:

    “The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: “—that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness—you know you say things are ‘much of a muchness’—did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?”

    Memory is an example of a muchness at work (or play).

    “That’s the effect of living backwards,” the Queen said kindly: “it always makes one a little giddy at first—”

    “Living backwards!” Alice repeated in great astonishment. “I never heard of such a thing!”

    “—but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.”

    “I’m sure mine only works one way,” Alice remarked. “I can’t remember things before they happen.”

    “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.

    If memory only works backwards, what do we call the facility by which we look ahead? Can we imagine a future different from anything that’s contained in our memory? Imagination is muchness at work (and play). But character and action need a place to unfold, and Manning describes dwellings and rooms, bars and cafes, parks and walkways and trails. You can have a conversation anywhere. And her writing while sparse of metaphor is not devoid of poetry:

    “The lawn was set with citrus trees that stood about in solitary poses like dancers waiting to open a ballet (695).

    The landscape is part of the weather:

    “As they rounded the house and came in sight of the sea, the clouds were split by streaks of pink. The sun was setting in a refulgence hidden from human eye. For an instant, the garden was touched with an autumnal glow, then the clouds closed and there was nothing but wintry twilight (695).

    For all indents and excursuses, we have run out of purposes, if we ever had any, having relied on the feeling that we might as we sometimes do find our purpose in the act of going forth, but there’s never a guarantee.

    Long Face

  • Notes on Olivia Manning’s “School for Love”

    “School for Love” (nyrb 2009) is a 1951 novel by the British writer Olivia Manning. The title comes from a conversation between the main character, Felix, and one of his housemates, Mrs Ellis, after she quotes from memory for Felix from the William Blake poem “The Little Black Boy,” from “Songs of Innocence”:

    Look on the rising sun – there God does live,
    And gives His light, and gives His heat away;
    And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
    Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.
    And we are put on earth a little space
    That we may learn to bear the beams of love… (166)

    Felix asks what it means, and Mrs Ellis says, “I suppose it means that life is a sort or school for love.” She doesn’t mention Blake by name, and is surprised Felix doesn’t know the poem, presumably mandatory reading for English schoolkids, but Felix has not had a typical British education. The reference comes in the last chapter, when Felix is about to complete his studies in this book that is a school for irony. The novel is set in Jerusalem at the end of World War II, where Felix, a young and naive teenager, having lost his father to an absurd fighting tangent and his mother to typhoid, comes to live in the house Miss Bohun has craftily usurped and uses like some evil landlord to manipulate and take advantage of her tenants. Finally, Mrs Ellis boldly confronts Miss Bohun:

    Mrs Ellis, breathless, her voice having about it a sort of glow and confidence of fury, said: ‘There you are Miss Bohun! I hear you are plotting to let my room….I thought I’d let you know you’re not getting rid of me so easily….’

    Miss Bohun’s voice was still mild, but her pleasantness had about it a quiet venom: ‘I thought when I saw you there was something about you . . . something vulgar and immoral. . .’

    Mrs Ellis broke in furiously: ‘I wouldn’t bring up morality or immorality, if I were you, Miss Bohun. What about you? A hypocrite, a liar, a cheat, a dirty-minded old maid’ (182-183).

    Miss Bohun of course tries to sell herself to others in terms opposite those characteristics. She does appear to have helped others, appears to hold an active and positive role in her community, and Felix is reluctant to revoke his loyalty to her for taking care of him when it seemed he had no one else to turn to and nowhere else to go. But he undergoes a slow awakening at the charges gradually revealed against Miss Bohun brought by Mrs Ellis. And Miss Bohun does not own the house in question, but has in effect stolen (saved, she would argue) the lease from a prior tenant whose family she then forces first into servitude and then out altogether. And she’s getting paid by the British for Felix’s room and board, while an element of absurdity is added to the plot when it’s divulged the curious, carefully furnished and clean but vacant front room is being saved for the Second Coming. And then it’s uncovered that Miss Bohun is receiving rent for that room also. She’s a kind of carpetbagger opportunist, and she’s very good at it, and she’s very good at explaining why she feels put upon and unappreciated.

    The characters live close to the weather and flowers and trees and one another, hungry and cold, hungry and hot, victims and refugees, and even when news comes the war is over in Europe, they can’t celebrate, because it’s assumed the local political friction will now grow much worse. Perhaps it’s too simple to say “life goes on,” but it does, and these are the people who see to it that it does, in spite of their losses or their measly gains that often come at disastrous costs to others. Miss Bohun hides all her deceitful behavior behind a facade of do-good intentions. Does she herself believe her intentions are good? Everything she’s taken she argues was a win-win. One wonders in the end what Mr. Jewel will have won. But he seems to be entering the renewed relationship with Miss Bohun with a clear vision of its costs and rewards.

    “I’m a lonely old man; she’s a lonely old woman,” Mr. Jewel tells Felix. A match made in heaven, though one can hardly imagine two people less compatible. In any case, as Mr. Jewel has already told Felix, “a wife and a fortune, they go together” (192).

    The book begins with winter snow when Felix arrives in Jerusalem and ends in summer as he’s preparing to leave for London, and throughout, Olivia Manning describes the changing weather, the landscape, walks through the colonies and to the cafes and hotels and gates and courtyards, with deft brush strokes, like impressionistic water colors, and the weather and plants are melded with the characters:

    On either side of the road the rocks were like great flints, the earth pinkish and bare as desert, and over all a silver glimmer fell from a dark sky (8).

    The garden was green and cold; the house colder. Most days the sky was stormy (24).

    Here the rains, following one another at intervals through the winter, carpeted the naked spring earth with a green as vivid as light. Later the grasses were enriched by the intricate leaves of trefoils, ranunculuses, anemones and vetches, and the spears of the bulb and tuber plants. Shortly before Mr Jewel was taken I’ll Felix saw the green cyclamen buds open, each dropping a screw of petals like a wrung-out cloth. In a day these had become flowers, alert and delicate as the ears of a gazelle (81).

    The summer was coming. There was no more rain; the sun’s heat grew, the spring flowers wilted, dried, turned to dust, and the fields grew bare. Now the beauty of the day came with the sunset and the sky turned from a pure, bright green to a peacock blue in which the stars shone each evening larger and more brilliant. The sunset translucence and colour lingered, perhaps until dawn (138).

    And there is the cat, Faro, another character in the book, that Felix loves, who gave him comfort night and day when he missed his mother so he cried helplessly alone:

    She was lying dozing along a bough shaded by ferns. Her fur, extremely soft and fitting like a loose glove, was pressed into folds along her legs and the line of her belly. Her summer coat had come in pale; there was a sheen over her whole body and a glisten of silver-white at her throat (172).

    A coming of age book, even if Felix does decide to keep the cat, adopt her as his own, and take her with him to London, another displaced, lower deck passenger, which is where Olivia Manning seems to find most of her characters:

    The liners had been turned into troop transports and perhaps the pets’ quarters had been dismantled – if so, there would be nowhere where he could shut her up at night. As a male civilian he would have no cabin. The army officers would have cabins to themselves in ‘A’ deck; the women and children would sleep about nine a cabin on ‘B’ deck; the civilian men, of whatever age and rank, would be allotted hammocks with the troops on the lower deck (175).