A New Year Resolution

I am and have almost finished reading Olivia Manning’s, The Balkan Trilogy: The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City and Friends and Heroes.

I read them and The Levant Trilogy in 2016, according to a post then. I have enjoyed re-visiting Bucharest and Athens in the early years of the war with her. I had forgotten how the narrative is peppered with descriptions of skies and landscapes, a beach near Athens and a face.

”The sea was fixed liked a jelly in bands of sombre colour: neutral at the edge, a heavy violet in mid-distance, indigo where it touched the horizon. In the jaundiced light the esplanade was grey but the pink and yellow houses shone with an unnatural clarity … “

“His face was plum-red and his moustache was the colour of fire. The two reds were so remarkable, it was some minutes before she noticed that the little snub nose, the little pink mouth and the small, wet yellow-brown eyes were altogether commonplace”
(Both Friends and Heroes)

She has an enhanced sense of colour and maybe could have been a painter. The portrait is of Roger Tandy, “the famous traveller”. Whoever she based him on she didn’t much like him. He only has a cameo role towards the end of Friends and Heroes.

“How many cases should there be?” Tandy replied: “Only seven. I travel light.”

Another aspect of the books is her vocabulary, so eclectic I sometimes think she invented words – I mean “titubancy”, for example – but she didn’t.

But life is too short to re-read much loved books and I need to break new ground. The only Paul Scott I have read, and it was in the late ‘70s, is Staying On. I watched The Jewel in the Crown at least twice but now want to read The Raj Quartet, four novels written between 1966 and 1975. That’s my new year resolution.