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Imperial Refugee |
August 22, 2014 |
| Reviewer:
Kathryn Laing, The Irish Review from Ireland
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In Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning's Fictions of War, which predates Deirdre David's study by a year, Eve Patten approaches Manning from a much more focused perspective. Describing her critical study of Manning as a literary biography shaped by war,she is largely concerned 'with recovering Manning's presence in the context of the Second World War and its novelistic legacies' (p. 46). She therefore concentrates on the two trilogies and the 'Palestine Fiction' (Artist Among the Missing and School for Love), concluding with a brief discussion of her final single novel, The Rain Forest (1974). The latter, published in between the trilogies, provides a fitting conclusion, Patten argues, because of its intersections with the trilogies, 'echoing and advancing their end-of-empire themes and building once again on the condition of a faltering marriage to survey the precarious state of the international climate' (p. 175).
Patten's especially direct and incisive approach to her subject right from the beginning - 'Manning's bitterness needs, like the author, careful handling as a starting-point to recover her place as a pre-eminent novelist of British wartime experience' (p. 2) - is indicative of her method overall, a stimulating and painstaking interrogation of her novels and the contexts in which they were written. Suggesting that it was Manning's 'embittered personality that sustained her skepticism towards what she regarded as the cultural bombast and vacuous political idealism carried by an inter-war generation of ideologues into the theatre of the Second World War' (p.2), Patten's study offers first a careful and rigorous teasing out of the multiple contexts in which Manning, her work and its composition is to be understood, as well as an unflinching confrontation of complex subjects such as 'Jewish dispossession' (p. 7), the question of Palestine, and the plight of the wartime refugee more broadly. In sum, Patten argues that Manning's fiction 'implicitly connects her own compromised sense of nationality, her transient life experience, the instability of her marriage and her frequent exclusion from events on the grounds of her sex to the desperate predicament of the war's itinerants and enforced exiles' (p. 7). There is special attention paid in this study to Manning's conflicted Irish identity, establishing connections in particular between the ways in which Manning's experience and knowledge of Ireland shaped her perspectives on Palestine, where she lived from 1942 to 1945: 'If Ireland provided the cradle for Manning's insights into a faltering Empire and national misalignments, wartime Palestine would subsequently offer her a complex revisiting of these themes' (p. 27). An Irish literary legacy is also identified in the gothic features of Manning's Balkan Trilogy, especially the Bucharest-set novels. In her analysis of Manning's deployment of the gothic, partially in the context of recent critical approaches that identify a 'Victorian gothic mode' within modernism, Patten suggests that an extension of this perspective to Second World War literature might be illuminating, where 'the marks of anxiety - particularly those connected by popular novels of the period to 'liminal threats' from infiltrators, fifth columnists and spies - are sustained and recurrent' (p. 63). Other critical lenses through which Manning's work have been and might be read are also explored: feminist, postcolonial, 'intermodernist', war literature, for example. Manning's work is also discussed in relation to her literary influences and affiliations, from Tolstoy and Dickens to contemporaries such as Storm Jameson, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and Lawrence Durrell. By reading her war fiction across these various differing fields and writers, this study opens up new perspectives for scholars working in these areas as well as on Manning specifically.
In addition to the trope of the refugee which Patten traces through its various permutations in Manning's war oeuvre, one of the most striking analyses is that the 'ship of death' motif constitutes a 'trailing motif of failed responsibility' (p. 159) as she describes it. Characteristic of her methods throughout, Patten traces the literary as well as biographical and historical sources of this motif, especially central in the 1951 novel School for Love. Manning's own experience of fleeing Athens in a dangerously overloaded and unsafe ship was one source of this motif. Another lies in the shocking story of the Struma, the ship with its overloaded cargo of Romanian Jews fleeing persecution, which was denied sanctuary anywhere, and instead left to its fate in the open seas where it sank (probably torpedoed). Manning published an account of this episode in the Observer Sunday Magazine (March 1970) and this particular ship would 'be one of the many ships of death haunting her post-war fiction, an image not only of suffering and terror but also of a grievous failure of protective duty' (p. 162). Patten urges care in approaching Manning's 'prickly personality' (p. 13) and her claims to an Irish identity, and the same care is evident in her examination of the differing geographical and political contexts of the trilogies. Is she guilty of perpetuating stereotypical representations of the Balkans in her fiction, for example, and what were her responses to the Zionist and refugee question in Palestine? Ultimately Patten suggests that Manning sidesteps this latter issue in her fiction, developing instead a 'purposeful reticence' (p. 172). So, '[t]he use of the 'ship of death' motif ’ in her wartime writing expresses deep anguish, but is a means to consolidate the specific plight of European Jews with a universal register of human suffering, dislocation and guilt. In the same way, the trilogies later develop the figure of the wartime refugee from its local contexts into a broader conceptual study of 'a dislocated and abject presence in the reconstitution of Europe' (p. 170). These powerful evocations of dislocation also constitute a major aspect of Patten's powerful and persuasive analysis of Manning's 'aesthetic of deracination' (p. 6).
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