To my mind, the two volumes of Olivia Manning's Balkan trilogy which are set in Rumania … show best how she can shift our whole sense of our connection with our European past, and make us aware how much we have given up in allowing our knowledge of its dissolution to be clouded. Her latest novel The Rain Forest is significantly separate in its intention. Although we are still in some sense a witness to a crumbling English colony obsessed by its own pecking order, while shivering in the glare of their formidable servant Akbar, it is no accident that Miss Manning has chosen to set this story in an imaginary island. The novel moves among people who are not so much caught in the grip of history, as lost representatives of a bewildered civilization, utterly vulnerable to rational forces of an apocalyptic intensity…. The climax of the book...