Confusion, strangeness, things falling apart—that is the wartime atmosphere which Olivia Manning evoked so vividly [in the Levant Trilogy]. She showed it on two levels. With Simon we go out into the desert and endure the soldier's lot of discomfort and danger, boredom and bewilderment…. At the beginning of The Sum of Things, the last volume in the Levant Trilogy, Simon is in a military hospital after being blown up by a mine…. [He] realises that he cannot move his legs and he is in a ward known as 'Plegics'…. For weeks he despairs, until one day he detects a twitch in one leg. His depression vanishes. This whole passage, like the battle scenes in The Danger Tree and The Battle Lost and Won, is marvellously authentic: a tour de force.

The other level on which Olivia Manning showed the disintegration of the old peacetime life and...