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 carries the sad English hero … [into a] world of skulls, ancient idols, and lines of ants strong enough to eat their way through living flesh. And there, indeed, carried by a small, unfamiliar spider, lives a disease hideously powerful enough to return the island to the pristine innocence of the earth before the depredations of mankind. On this surreal vision the book ends; but it should not be thought that Miss Manning has sacrificed any of her sharp observation of human behavior to achieve it. The mutual hatred of the central couple is beautifully observed, and contains among other strains the resentment one writer may feel for another's creativity…. And the squabbling in the Daisy Hotel is caught with precision; the regular petty harassing of guests who are out of favour with a new management and the discovery that the implacable agent of persecution turns out to be simply bribable. In The Rain Forest a world of multiple tensions is drawn together in a formidable piece of writing.