
Olivia Manning is definitely one of those writers whose books I always feel confident of enjoying. I don’t think I had known that she had published short stories, until I came across this collection in a charity shop. There are fourteen stories in A Romantic Hero – also the title of the penultimate story.
In these stories Olivia Manning explores lonely childhoods and complex adult relationships. Her stories, just like her wonderful novels are shot through with her precise understanding of people, their domestic dramas, their sadness and their humour. Arranged chronologically (I like that way of putting story collections together) these stories represent a period of almost thirty years of Manning’s creative life, with the first two stories dating from 1938 and the final story from 1966.
Rather than try and talk about all fourteen stories in this collection, I will give just a flavour of some of them. One thing I really liked was how Olivia Manning takes to so many different locations, from coastal Ireland to Cairo, to Jerusalem and a snowy wartime Romania. Many of the locations I have encountered in her novels.
“There, clutching the tufts of hard grass, they could look down into the crevices where they believed the strong-smelling weed hid giant octopi and other secret, colourless monsters.
They came to the leap.
Mrs Clandavy, on the other side of the wall, started calling them again.
‘We’re coming,’ Joseph answered as he took the leap without pausing to measure it or glance down. He went over with this bone-thin legs bent. His knickers, his ragged jersey and his socks were all too short, and his limbs stuck out from them like sticks. His neck, like a thin stalk, held precariously the weight of his large head with its thick, untidy, fawn-coloured hair. Van, a year older, taller and even thinner, followed him easily.”
(Childhood – 1938)
The collection opens with Childhood a story paired with the one that comes after it, The Two Birthdays. Both stories are about the Clandavy children and their difficult emotional mother. In the first story Van and her younger brother Joseph are exploring the beach near their Irish home. Picking up bits of debris from the beach, checking on Mr Congo the crab they have adopted and been finding food for. Hearing their mother calling, they are forced to leave the beach and return to the house, and the difficult, confusing atmosphere, where their parents are frequently waging war, and playing the children off on one another. In the second of these, time has moved on a little, and Mrs Clandavy has separated from her husband. There is a day out with neighbours planned on the river, which Joseph has been looking forward to. These stories are slow and meandering, and I love that kind of storytelling and there is a deliciously strong sense of time and place too.
Other Irish families appear in this collection, like in The Visit, in which the narrator remembers a visit to a Lady Moxton when she was a child. She hadn’t really wanted to go and had been relying on her brother to be with her, but at the last minute he was ill in bed with a cold. She travels by tram with her bossy, ambitious mother and must face the strange old woman without her brother.
I was reminded strongly of The Balkan Trilogy in In A Winter Landscape in which we follow a British couple as they travel across Romania by train. They meet a Polish soldier and get into conversation, spending a couple of days in one another’s company on the train and overnight at a hotel. Manning’s descriptions of the landscape are lovely, her eye for detail as good as ever.
“The damp in the air had covered the carriage windows with long ferns of frost. One could scrape off the frost and see through the glass the white landscape going past. This was wheat-growing country, treeless, the fields repeating themselves in hills and hollows that looked barren, as though made of salt.”
(In a Winter Landscape – 1941)
In The Man who Stole a Tiger, we meet Tandy, a survivor of a lost troopship, he was brought back to health in a Jerusalem sanatorium. The story is narrated by a Padre who spends time with Tandy before and after the events related in the story, the Padre never really liked Tandy, who he describes as an ex-borstal boy. While recovering in Jerusalem, Tandy found himself visiting the zoo – and it was there he decided to free the tiger who he seemed to connect with and feel needed rescuing. Tandy steals the tiger and then embarks on an absurdly long journey by road. I won’t spoil the ending – which most readers will see coming – but it’s wonderfully subtle and desperately poignant.
In Twilight of the Gods Elizabeth goes on holiday to Ireland just after the war. Here she meets again a woman she knew years earlier and had once thought rather glamourous. She finds a woman greatly changed and living in the middle of an uncomfortable domestic situation which Elizabeth is keen not to get drawn into.
In the title story; A Romantic Hero, we meet Harold, living (kind of) with Angela – who he doesn’t love. One day he meets a good looking young man called David, and Harold is smitten – and imagines David feels as he does. He arranges to meet the young man the following day, and of course nothing goes quite as Harold imagines.
All in all this was a lovely collection, reminding me – had I needed it, what a great writer Olivia Manning is. When I finished the Levant trilogy around Christmas, I felt quite bereft, so I was in need of another Olivia Manning book I think.