Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
I think she was one of the very best novelists of the 20th century. These books were her best pieces. What I found fascinating was all the drama of the Second World War in rather peripheral places. But the drama and the feeling of the war was written against a background of a young couple who just got married and who were very different in their outlook on life, and the problems of their marriage.
Your fourth choice is a trilogy of books by Olivia Manning.
I think she was one of the very best novelists of the 20th century. These books, The Balkan Trilogy – and The Levant Trilogy – were her best pieces. What I found fascinating was all the drama of the Second World War in rather peripheral places. But the drama and the feeling of the war was written against a background of a young couple who had just got married and who were very different in their outlook on life, and the problems of their marriage.
It’s been described as a tragicomedy.
Yes, she manages somehow to create what the wartime situation was. The British Council are portrayed as awful self-interested characters, hardly interested in the war itself. The couple are always picking up these helpless characters too, these stray cats of people and helping them along.
How is the business of war reportage portrayed here?
She gets various jobs, putting out British information. There are a lot of reporters that pass through, rather like the reporters in Scoop. She takes a rather critical view of most people though; she’s not very kind, very objective. From time to time she’s emotionally involved with people, whereas Guy Pringle, the husband, is a hopeless bundle of love and left-wing sympathies.
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Richard Beeston is the former Daily Telegraph correspondent for Beirut, Nairobi, Moscow and Washington. He began his long career working for an Arabic radio station run by MI6 during the Suez War. He has covered the collapse of the Belgian Congo, East Africa’s post-independence struggles, revolutions in the Middle East, the Vietnam War, Watergate and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Since 1990 he’s worked as a freelance writer for the Times, the Daily Telegraph and Saga Magazine.
