Imagine if Jane Austen had returned to travel the world in the mid-20th century and to read novelists like Henry James, E.M. Forster and Graham Greene. What might she have written? Something like Shirley Hazzard's ''The Great Fire''? Austen lived through a turbulent era, when the Napoleonic wars were raging, yet she stubbornly kept the great world outside of her novels. Her world was made up of small English villages, and she persistently saw it through the eyes of her female protagonists. Hazzard's novel is Austen turned inside out. Her protagonist is male, and the novel travels to Japan, Hong Kong, England, Italy, Australia, New Zealand and even Berkeley. And great conflicts -- World War II, which has just ended, and the Cold War, which is just beginning -- are very much at the forefront of the book. Yet like Austen's books, ''The Great Fire'' is a romance -- a love story in which two people have to overcome obstacles set in their way by family and society. And like Austen, Hazzard transcends the familiar and banal plotting of the romance to produce a work of sophistication and high intelligence. ''The Great Fire'' is as luminous as the Turner painting on the book's cover -- and as flecked with darkness and mystery. It's 1947, and Aldred Leith, a 32-year-old Englishman, has arrived in Japan after journeying across China to gather material for a book about the postwar world. Leith has served bravely and was seriously wounded in World War II, and being a decorated war hero opens many doors for him. He finds lodgings in what was once the retreat for a Japanese admiral, on an island near Hiroshima. Now the retreat is a British military hospital compound, presided over by an Australian officer, Brigadier Barry Driscoll, an unpleasant man with a wife to match -- ''that Melba and Barry should be in the ascendant was not what onehad hoped from peace,'' Leith reflects. ''It did not even seem a cessation of hostilities.'' One day Leith comes upon a ''hysterical'' Driscoll ''shrieking into the face of'' one of the Japanese servants. Shortly afterward, Leith finds the servant's body -- the young man has disemboweled himself in an act of ritual suicide. But the Driscolls have two brilliant, charming children: a 20-year-old son, Benedict, who is gravely ill; and a daughter, Helen, who is her older brother's constant companion. ''Leith saw that the Driscolls used the daughter for the care of their son. And also that this abuse was as yet her sole salvation.'' Leith and Helen will fall in love, and the obstacles to their union will include animosity toward Leith from Helen's parents -- ''two hurt and irreparable figures who hate too readily,'' Leith calls them -- and Helen's devotion to her brother. And there's also the disparity of their ages -- Helen, Leith learns, has just turned 17. He confides this ''unsought, and impossible'' love to a friend: ''So much is wrong. She, from the romance of it, imagines herself in love -- or so I believe. I, at this age and stage, have grown serious. She is in these respects ignorant, having been allowed no life of her own. I can't envision myself as -- what used to be called -- her seducer.'' In fact, in an irony Hazzard introduces quietly (she does nothing blatantly), Leith has been on the other end of an age disparity: When he was 20, he had an affair with a woman in her late 30s, the mother of one of his friends. His other relationships with women have ended unhappily: As a student in Italy before the war, he was involved with two beautiful sisters, one of whom was killed by the fascists. And he has married and divorced; while they were separated during the war, his wife found someone she loved more. Helen holds out a special promise for Leith: a future that he had once believed the war would take from him. ''Having expected, repeatedly, to die from the great fires into which his times had pitched him, he had recovered a great desire to live completely; by which he meant, with her.'' Yet even geography will divide them -- they are about as far apart as you can get on this planet after his father's death forces Leith to return to England, and the Driscolls take Helen with them to New Zealand. Well, obstacles are what fiction overcomes. But Hazzard's narrative strategy is to provide distractions as well -- the rich busyness of life. A novel that focused on Leith and Helen alone would be flat indeed. So Hazzard occasionally shifts the focus of the novel to Leith's friend Peter Exley, an Australian officer stationed in Hong Kong, where he investigates war crimes. In Hazzard's narrative scheme, Exley is almost an alter ego for Leith; Exley's story, in which an attempt at a humanitarian act has terrible consequences, suggests what Leith's life might have been like under different circumstances. Exley is also Hazzard's vehicle for wry comments on Australia -- the country of her birth, which she left in 1947. (It's not entirely coincidental, I suspect, that this is the year in which ''The Great Fire'' takes place, or that she was almost exactly Helen's age at the time.) Hazzard's Australia is a provincial, deeply racist society, steeped in bourgeois respectability. When the young Exley proposes to study art, his father retorts, ''We don't go for that in Australia, you'd have to leave the country.'' And the elder Exley is relieved when his son brings home a girlfriend, ''having feared, from art history, abominations.'' The war serves as a refining fire -- one of the points of Hazzard's title, I suspect -- that purges away Exley's provincialism, and Leith's as well. When they meet in Cairo in 1943, the two men share an awareness of how the war has opened up a wider world for them. Exley realizes that Australia had stunted him: ''Isolation had made me arrogant. . . . I wasn't prepared for the quality of thought in others.'' Leith's recognition is that England is ''the land of the single hope attained. . . . People longed for a house and garden. . . . The women longed to be married, come what might. The evidence achieved, you could die happy. In my childhood there were many such walking about, who had died happy and could leave it at that.'' Hazzard's novel succeeds through its continually surprising turns of phrase and narrative, and her audacious willingness to keep her story buzzing with life -- new characters are being introduced up until the final chapters. In fact, reviewers who received early bound galleys of the book were sent revisions of the last two chapters shortly before publication, after Hazzard apparently decided to expand the role of one of these late-arriving characters, in part to spin out the tension over whether Helen and Leith will ever reunite. I sense that she could have gone on forever developing the world she has imagined in this book -- which may be why it has been 23 years since her last novel, the acclaimed ''Transit of Venus.'' Well, I, for one, am glad she decided to stop writing this one and let us read it. For despite its flaws -- Helen and her brother never fully emerge into the real world from the realm of ideas in which they are conceived, and while the plethora of secondary characters gives the novel its energy, it sometimes spins the story off into eddies of distraction -- this is a novel of savor and substance.
The only great thing about "The Great Fire" is its name. This is one of those books that as you read it, you find yourself lost in thoughts about the morning commute, the long ago expired and still unpaid decal on your front windshield, about the dog, that you forgot to feed and you now know it repaid you by doing its business on the one spot of the carpet, which you fiercely guarded and hoped to protect before the weekend party with your boss and his pricy wife who for some time now has been...but then you collect your thoughts and try again to refocus your attention on this story of post war Japan and the Australian soldier who fell in love with a teenager, or was the chap British...and the she, the bosses wife, who strangely winked at you during the last Christmas party and you felt like choking...he must have been Australian since in the end he decided to stay with the girl in Australia...but now you know that the spot in the carpet would forever remain brownish with its if not putrid then at least nagging reminder of the day you forgot to feed the damn dog because the book you were tying to read...but who really cares whether the Australian and the teenager remained faithful to each other, after all the world really changed since 1947...and so you hope that the next paycheck would be enough for you to make a call to `Stanley Steamer' and have them fix the memory of your immoral transgression...But back to the book! If you love British style novels of the kind where old ladies and younger chaps (with names like Bertram and Aldred) get together to have some tea, then in their spare time write long romantic letters, and from time to time remind each other of the horrid world war 2, this is the book for you. If you are like me, meaning you have so much on your mind that it'd take a much stronger novel to keep your attention pinned to its pages, then I highly recommend you withhold the urge to read this one.
What do You think about The Great Fire (2004)?
The Great Fire is the 5th novel by Australian author, Shirley Hazzard. Set firstly in immediate post-war Japan and Hong Kong, then in England and New Zealand, this is the story of Aldred Leith, author, researching a book on China and Japan and Peter Exley, solicitor and fine art enthusiast, investigating Japanese war crimes. Leith encounters, whilst researching Hiroshima, a brother and sister, Ben and Helen Driscoll. Ben has a condition which is slowly killing him. Helen is on the cusp of adulthood. Essentially a love story, this novel is filled with beautiful, descriptive prose, but builds very slowly and Hazzard seems somewhat detached from her characters. Her love of literature is apparent. I liked the device Hazzard used to indicate thoughts during dialogue. ‘this is what he said’, and what he thought as he was saying it, ‘and what else he said’. It certainly made me pay attention to the quotation marks. As with the Transit of Venus, this novel is beautifully written and lovers of language will enjoy the experience. I found the plot and the characters much better than Transit and overall, certainly a more satisfying novel than The Transit of Venus.
—Marianne
While I want to give it a higher rating, I found this book challenging to read. The author's voice was very difficult for me to interpret at times, which detracted from my enjoyment of it.On one hand, the sentences could be lovely, intricate and descriptive. A line: "Having expected, repeatedly, to die from the great fires into which his times had pitched him, he discovered a desire to live completely; by which he meant, with her."On the other hand, they could be so subtle as to be virtually unintelligible. I'm not a novice reader (as I imagine is clear) but sometimes it felt that the author was going out of her way to be confusing or remove all but the subtlest hint of context from a sentence so I'd have to read it three times and let it sink in for a moment before understanding it. Some people might like that, writing that's like a puzzle, but I didn't.When I tried reading bits of it aloud, that actually helped; I think discussing it with people might've helped too. Even so, for a love story, it seemed rather removed and dispassionate, the dialogue between the lovers terser than seemed necessary. Maybe this is one of the few books that I'd like better as a movie?
—Jules
Initially I considered not continuing to read this book because of what I considered a slow pace. Many of my GR friends, whose opinions I often share, had praised this, so I perservered. It is well that I did for I discovered that Hazzard has written an hypnotic, complex novel. Her prose is elegant, vivid and fervent. . The Great Fire of the title refers to the conflagration which was WW ll, choking and convulsing the world in its wake. The story takes place in the post-war years, mostly in Asia, but continues through Europe and Australia. The anguish, the devastated humanity and the blighted land around them were conveyed with scrupulous clarity.Despite my sense of a plodding beginning, the narrative built in intensity, imparting a building suspense culminating in the conclusion. I have not attempted to describe the plot of this book because Hazzard has related her tale much better than I could. It would be better if you, the Reader, would persist through that slow beginning and discover what has built up to a fine book!
—Barbara
