I think Harriet Pringle is the greater character: wise and helpful for newly married young soldier Simon Boulderstone, freshly arrived from England; she is the one who counsels Guy to be diplomatic when he is trying to negotiate a job with the odious Gracey; the one who sees Edwina Little for the beautiful, sweet but shallow girl she is; the one who befriends Lady Angela Cooper, not her type at all; the one who accurately reads the feelings and emotions of those around her. Sadly, with Fortunes of War, casting works against the film. Where Guy Pringle is a big bear of a man in the novels, Branagh's sensitive Guy just isn't the same character. And where Harriet Pringle is a small and at times frail woman in the novels, Thompson's Harriet is, well, Emma Thompson. This is not a small matter. The novels' point of view is that of Harriet and what we get there is a detailed, personal, even intimate view of the Pringles' marriage. If you read these novels all in a rush, you almost become Harriet Pringle for a time, immersed in the details of her marriage, seeing the world through her eyes. There's a toughness to Harriet, but also vulnerability, something that Guy often misses as he plunges into one project after another. Little of this comes through in the film. The leading characters, Harriet and Guy Pringle, are based on Manning herself and her husband R. D. Smith. Harriet loves Guy but has to share him with numerous hangers-on, as Guy loves everybody he meets. [1] His character is outgoing and generous, while hers is wistful and introspective. Guy and Major Cookson were the only people to follow Pinkrose’s coffin to the English cemetery and neither could be described as a mourner.”

They don't think we're here to protect them. They think we're here to use them. And so we are. We're protecting the Suez Canal and the route to India and Clifford's oil company.'

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A good follow-up to the Balkan Trilogy, with some very beautifully-written passages. There were some repetitive references to characters and events, as if Manning had forgotten that she had already mentioned these things. Guy Pringle, Harriet's husband, becomes quite infuriating by the 6th book (as I think he is meant to), as are most of the other male characters, and quite a few of the female characters. But I liked Harriet, the main character, quite a bit (especially when she strikes off to have her own adventures), and Simon, the young officer, was an engaging and sympathetic figure. Angela, Harriet's friend, was also a compelling figure. The Spoilt City,” is the second volume in Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy. The uncertainty surrounding Romania in the first novel is even more pronounced at the beginning of this book. Rumours and suspicions abound and the English are viewed as likely losers of the war. Harriet begins to long for safety, but Guy refuses to accept that he will have to leave and, to Harriet’s exasperation, throws himself wholeheartedly into organising the summer school at the University. Olivia Manning, Βαλκανική Τριλογία, το οποίο είναι αυτοβιογραφικό μιας και η συγγραφέας έζησε από κοντά όσα αφηγείται, ως σύζυγος μέλους του Βρετανικού Συμβουλίου στο Βουκουρέστι και μετά στην Ελλάδα. Η Manning περιγράφει την ζωή της σε σχέση με την ταχεία μεταστροφή της Συμμαχικής Ρουμανίας σε μέλος του Άξονα και πως αυτό επέδρασε και στη δική της ζωή. I wonder that the author has Dobson, the English diplomat in Cairo, forget who Percy Gibbon is. Guy and Harriet have a room that Dobson let Them have at the embassy flat, where another room is occupied by Gibbon. He snarls at everyone, and acts peeved and thoroughly put-out that he has to suffer others living in the flat. When Harriet mentioned to Dobson that she was afraid that she and her husband were putting him out, Dobson tells Harriet that it is he, Percy, who is putting Dobson out. Dobson had earlier been talked into letting Gibbon stay for a"few days," which had turned into more than a year. And yet, when Dobson was asked to find a place for the wife of a fellow diplomat, he seems to not know who Percy is:

Yet, in the end, his very inattentiveness becomes a positive: "Could she, after all, have borne with some possessive, interfering, jealous fellow who would have wanted her to account for every breath she breathed? Not for long." Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy consists of the novels: The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City and Friends and Heroes. The trilogy is a semi-autobiographical work based loosely around her own experiences as a newlywed in war torn Europe. The first book, “The Great Fortune,” begins in 1939, with Harriet Pringle going to Bucharest with her new husband, Guy. Guy Pringle has been working the English department of the University for a year and met, and married, Harriet during his summer holiday. As they travel through a Europe newly at war, one of the other characters on the train is Prince Yakimov, a once wealthy man who is now without influence or protection and who feels he is being unjustly ‘hounded’ out of one capital city after another. Harriet herself has virtually no family – her parents divorced when she was young and she was brought up by an aunt. In personality she is much less extrovert than Guy, who befriends everyone and expects to be befriended in turn. Throughout this novel I shared Harriet’s exasperation with her new husband, who constantly seems to care about everyone’s feelings, but ignores his new wife’s plight of being isolated in a new city, where she feels friendless and lonely. Olivia Manning’s greatest achievements are the Balkan and Levant novels. In these she handles her daunting wealth of material with great artistic dexterity and an admirable sense of proportion that at the same time never reduces. Nor does her concern to understand public events impair her analytical comprehension of the private lives of her people . . . Olivia Manning wrote as courageously about death and the fear of death—in combat, in accident, through disease, through age—as any novelist in our language this century.”The war had abandoned them, leaving them in a vacuum that had been filled by everyday worries. But everyday worries were not enough. They had to invent excitements to make life bearable." There's just a middle section where it all bogs down a bit, and takes the trilogy from a five to a four, in my book. Manning is an excellent portraitist, but her characters don't grow or change much. As we move through books two and three, Guy is still obliviously gregarious and blind to Harriet's needs, Lush and Dubedat stay craven, Yaki still wants a drink, etc. etc. Perhaps the claustrophobia of that world is part of what Manning means to convey but the third book of the Balkan Trilogy (except, as noted, the dramatic very end) is a bit too faithful to reality for my tastes in depicting the neverending round of bars, bad wartime meals and boring conversations. You feel you've seen Mannning's set pieces before and I at least grew weary of her almost real-time depiction of the events leading up to the fall of Greece.