The Sum of Things [Hardcover]

Manning keeps this short. And it's a good thing. Not much happens here.

What little action there is, in concluding her six-volume series following Guy and Harriet Pringle through World War II, alternates between Harriet and young officer Simon Boulderstone.

Harriet, pushed in the last volume by her husband to return to England, at the last moment heads instead for Damascus with two lesbian truck drivers. Her intended ship meanwhile is torpedoed days later. Guy, who doesn't know she didn't get on the ship, thinks she's dead. And Harriet, out of touch with Cairo, has no idea about the ship or Guy's misconception.

She finds herself adrift with dwindling money, no job, and few friends. She accepts the company of a Christian Arab but must fend off his advances. She does some paperwork for a traveling professor who skips town without paying her. She heads for Beirut out of desperation and fortuitously bumps into her old friend, Lady Angela Hooper, who has fled Cairo with lover Bill Castlebar to avoid his wife. All the while Harriet contemplates her few options in life, such as returning to Guy.

Seriously wounded at El Alamein, Boulderstone wonders if he'll ever walk again, going through cycles of euphoria and despair. He desperately wants to see his late brother's girlfriend, the lovely husband-hunting Edwina, but then can't bear to see her. Guy Pringle begins to visit him in the hospital.

The war recedes from Cairo as the British fights their way west, meet up with the Americans, and prepare to invade Italy.

The characters find some small upturn in their lives as well. Harriet returns to Cairo, is reunited with Guy and reconciles herself to the imperfection of marriage, having learned a bit of independence. Boulderstone slowly recovers and returns to active duty, hoping to see action in Italy.

Harriet and Boulderstone, put bluntly, are two of life's losers. She seems helpless to affect her own life - to fill her time in the absence of her ever-busy husband, to support herself, to thrive on her own. Boulderstone hasn't lived much life and now his seems nearly over. He has no friends. His crush on Edwina seems absurd, considering how little attention she's ever paid to him. As his recovery slowly begins, he fantasizes about a return to active duty and a military career that seem highly unlikely.

There are a lot of people like Harriet and Boulderstone in life and there is merit to exploring them literarily - the lives of real people, average people, rather than of the great or heroic. Manning explores how they have fewer choices and feel hemmed in by those made - military service, a humdrum job, a hasty marriage for practicality's sake.

But after six volumes, I tired of them, particularly Boulderstone. At least Harriet, helpless though she seems, is perceptive. Boulderstone is of little interest as we explore the loneliness, insecurity and mere shreds of personality hidden behind a young British officer's façade.

Manning makes Guy Pringle a foil because of his bumbling insensitivity towards Harriet, but he's actually much more successful than any other characters at making a life out of the hand he's been dealt - a poor schoolteacher abroad during challenging times, meeting the locals, immersing himself in academic and cultural affairs, with a kind word and time for all (except his wife).

There are few reflections in these books about the war itself, or about the peoples and places of the Middle East beyond a tour-guide level, as the characters visit this or that dusty ruin. Local characters, Egyptians mainly in the last three novels, never develop much past a cartoonish two-dimensionality. Manning relies heavily on descriptions of scenery and locale as well as her main characters' interior states, but little happens and much of what does happen, never amounts to much.