What I Read in 2024: The Great Fortune by Olivia Manning
If I had to pick, the best book I read in 2024 was probably Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune, published in 1960. The novel is the first of a trilogy set during World War II and follows Harriet Pringle and her husband Guy, a young British couple who in 1939 move to Bucharest where Guy has a position as an English teacher. The story is partly about Harriet’s struggles to adjust to life in her new home and partly about the tensions in her marriage to Guy, who has attractive political and moral convictions but not the social and emotional awareness that Harriet desires. All the while, the opening salvos of World War II occur in the background and give the narrative a simmering, sinister tension, with the looming threat of a German invasion and a fascist movement stirring in Romania.
The power of the book, however, isn’t in these larger political shifts but in the personal and social dynamics between Harriet, Guy, and their circle of British expatriates, an entertaining cast of characters with subtle and intriguing personalities. If anything, the novel drags a bit when it delves too much into the politics of Romania’s fascist moment, which doesn’t bear so directly Harriet’s life. Instead, these events work best as a background to the personal conflicts, such as the subtle flirtation between Harriet and one of Guy’s colleagues, Clarence, or the frequent appearances of Sophie, one of Guy’s students who seems to Harriet just a little too fond of her husband, or the comedic antics of the most entertaining character of all, the perpetually down-on-his-luck Prince Yakimov, a White Russian émigré constantly trying to finagle money from his friends to fund his lavish taste in food and drink.
The other thing that must be noted is the strength of Olivia Manning’s writing. There are not necessarily any dramatic lyrical flourishes or passages of particular experimental brilliance, but she writes with that classical and assured elegance of style in which everything is done extremely well. The novel is primarily told through fully fleshed out scenes, which keeps the story engaging and immediate. There are beautiful descriptive passages of Harriet’s observations, written with the rich sensory detail that midcentury writers deployed so effectively, as well as engaging sequences of dialogue in which characters banter and the tension simmers just below the surface. Manning doesn’t interrupt these scenes with too much interior reflection, and there are no flashbacks to Harriet’s past in England. Instead, we stay in Bucharest and let the narrative unfold from Harriet’s present circumstances. I think some contemporary novels fail because the most interesting stuff happens in flashback and the present storyline feels insubstantial by comparison. But Manning, like many writers from that era, knows how to tell an engaging story, even when it’s about something as subtle as interpersonal relationships.
The novel ends with a surprisingly moving sequence in which Guy decides to get everyone together to perform Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. On its surface, it seems like a silly and not very dramatic way to end a novel about an impending war, but it works because Manning is an expert in using the play to unlock the complexities of the characters we’ve come to know. The Trojan War is an excellent symbolic background for the unfolding events, and through the performance, Manning seems to be making a commentary on the role of art in a time of crisis. It’s also, ultimately, a celebration of Englishness, the way these characters come together to pay tribute to their country’s greatest playwright, just as that country faces an existential threat.
Ultimately, The Great Fortune is the kind of novel where “nothing happens” — and yet, it’s impossible to put down. I listened to the audiobook, narrated with wonderful subtlety by Harriet Walter, and I found myself lost in the rhythms of her voice and in Manning’s subtle prose. Sometimes — perhaps most of the time — plot is significantly less important in a novel than atmosphere and characterization. We read books to see the visions of others who’ve lived lives different from our own. With The Great Fortune, Manning lets us look upon a rare social world at the very moment it breaks apart.
