us vein of irony.public domain intrudes more into the work of Olivia Manning (1917-1980) who found herself, with her husband, in Bucharest in 1939, to be driven by German advances first to Greece, then to Egypt. She recorded her experience in her Balkan Trilogy: The Great Fortune (1960), The Spoilt City (1962) and Friends and Heroes (1965), documenting how people behaved as the Nazi menace encroached on English residents. The private story of Harriet Pringle and her husband Guy is one of colliding temperaments.woman who was in the right place at the right time as a future novelist is Doris Lessing (b.1919), brought up in Southern Rhodesia. Her sequence of five novels called Children of Violence begins with Martha Quest (1952) and tells the story of Martha s upbringing and development. It is a story of personal search and struggle, by a self-centered woman, against the fetters of sexual, social and political conventions. Her latest novels of 2005 are The Story of General Dann and Mara s Daughter and Griot and the Snow Dog.fascination of the twentieth century history has touched other writers too. Richard Hughes s (1900-1976) two volumes of his trilogy, The Human Predicament, on events that culminated in the Second World War, include The Fox in the Attic (1961) and The Wooden Shepherdess (1972), covering the years from Hitler s putsch in 1923 to the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.Trevor (b.1928), is an Irish novelist and short-story writer of broader range and richer gifts, perhaps the most distinctive novelist to emerge since William Golding and Muriel Spark. In The Old Boys (1964) he focuses on a group of cranky old human misfits in a story of an old boys association and their annual reunion, and in The Boarding House (1965) on the inhabitants of an establishment equally conducive to the harbouring of mildly potty and inadequate individuals. Trevor s terse, crisp dialogue, and his dry, detached portrayal of seediness, ill-humour are fetchingly entertaining. And there is compassion too. Trevor extended his range in Mrs Eckdorfin O Neill s Hotel (1970). A woman photographer is seeking material for her next coffee-table documentary at a Dublin hotel that has decayed from its former splendour and is now used as a brothel. Trevor has continued to be productive as a novelist (The Children of Dynmouth, 1976, and Other People s Worlds, 1980), and he is also a versatile writer of short stories. The tales in Angels at the Ritz (1974) show an interest in personal experiences of frustration and anti-climax which naturally called out comparisons with Joyce s Dubliners. In 2000 W.Trevor published The Hill Bachelors, delicately revelatory Irish stories and worries about ageing and family. The Story of Luce Gault (2002) and A Bit On the Side (2004), a collection of short stories on adultery, are William Trevor s latest books.talent of matching distinction, if not of comparable imaginative range, is that of Jennifer Johnston (b.1930), the daughter of the Irish playwright Denis Johnston, herself a novelist and a playwright. She portrays the Anglo-Irish landed gentry with a subtle registration of their awkward relationship to local peasants and retainers. Since her first novel The Captains and the Kings (1972) she has published many novels. In The Gates (1973) Major MacMahon decays alcoholically while his orphaned niece finds consolation with a peasant boy. In How Many Miles to Babylon (1974) Irish heir and peasant boy go off to fight together as officer and private in the First World War, and the mechanical pressures of military discipline turn their impulsive affection for each other into a cause of tragedy. Her novel The Gingerbread Woman (2000) is a story of personal tragedy intersecting with the national one in present-day Ireland inside a novel being written by the main woman character. Other novels include: The Invisible Worm (1991), dealing with the subject of sexual abuse; This is Not a Novel (2002), and most recently published Grace and Truth (2005). Younger novelists now at work AN Wilson (b. 1950) has a comparably beguiling sense of humour. In The Healing Art (1980) X-ray reports on two Oxford women are mixed up so that the housewife wrongly thinks she is clear and the English don, Pamela Cooper, struggles unnecessarily to accommodate herself to a death sentence. Pamela, an Anglo-Catholic, is persuaded to seek miraculous healing at the shrine at Walsingham and a seeming miracle ensues. Wilson s registration of the contemporary scene is acutely ironic; yet his strength is that he is not pure satirist, pure humourist or...
