Shirley Hazzard has a remarkable gift for evoking atmosphere and places, as in her descriptions of postwar Hong Kong, rank with decay, grimy and sticky, the July air ‘a blanket, summer weight’...Equally acute are the descriptions of the people Exley encounters: the Eurasians, desperate to oblige the ‘unmixed races,’ European or Asian, who treat them with disdain; the laughing, bouncing, big-boned English girls forever somewhere in Middlesex. None of these women tempts Exley out of his torpor. During his sleepless nights, in Hazzard’s phrase, he has to fight alone the war that he cannot survive. Leith does survive in the end, redeemed by love. That is the heart of Hazzard’s story, but there is a subplot, which can be summarized as the great escape from the Antipodes … Beautifully observed, and deeply depressing. But how could it be otherwise? Places play their assigned roles in this love story, just as the people do.
...a classic romance so cleverly embedded in a work of clear-eyed postwar sagacity that readers will not realize until halfway through that they are rooting for a pair of ill-starred lovers who might have stepped off a Renaissance stage … This is not a novel of war and its aftermath so much as a study of how people act, and how they are acted upon, in the wake of violent disruption. After you shake the chessboard, how will the pieces realign themselves? … The greatest pleasure is her subtle and unexpected prose...Never lyrical for the sake of lyricism, [it] follows the sensible course of her characters – open to beauty and alert to its dangers.
The old stories endure, and one of the most enduring is that of the damsel in distress who is rescued by her peerless knight astride his charger. However, it would be a brave writer who would dare, in this Age of Irony, to make it the basis for a novel … Hazzard's book...flatters us in its assumption that we are engaged along with the author in a philosophical meditation on the deeper meaning of life, but her elliptical style will quickly try the patience of all but the most devoted reader … Leith, the divorced, lonely romantic, immediately falls in love with Helen, and the tale gets properly under way. Even in these earliest pages, the reader can hear the knight's armor creaking, his steed pawing the earth and the damsel's soft gasps of anticipation.
In truth, much that we expect in a love story is missing; a reader will miss it. What beats in Ms. Hazzard's restrained but tingling pulse is something else: not feelings, but the painting that memory makes of them – haunting as a portrait that instigates the imagination more than the sitter could. Her sentences are insidious strokes of a finely haired badger brush … Ms. Hazzard has written a romance, in a way, though far closer to Rilke than Barbara Cartland. We realize that whatever feyness tugged at earlier parts of the story has come to serve its theme. Only a young belief that the world is boundless assures that the bounds accepted in maturity will not be a prison.
[The Great Fire] streaks through a reader's ken in the manner of a comet, quickly seizing the attention and emotions before disappearing, trailed by hopes for the characters' happiness—which, like a comet's return, the reader only half believes in … ‘All speech is an exposure,’ Hazzard writes in this new book, some of whose dialogue...may strike one as bordering on the precious or implausible. But in fact it never forces a suspension of disbelief, because Hazzard's narration is more articulate than almost anything we're now accustomed to reading: what's within quotation marks seems credible simply by the standard of what's without.
The Great Fire is set in American-occupied Japan two years after the end of World War II, and in it Hazzard appears to develop the theme of antipost-colonialism. She depicts the new postwar, post-independence bureaucrats of Japan and Hong Kong as self-centered, provincial, just as racist as their predecessors, importunely egalitarian, and void of curiosity, imagination, and a sense of history … And yet, having established all this promising political context in the first few chapters of her novel, Hazzard promptly loses interest in it. The Great Fire is a lyrical rather than social novel, its richest writing reserved for landscapes as seen in the fresh, full light of day … For all her subtlety and depth, Hazzard does not create memorable or particularly believable characters, or, if she manages to, she doesn't seem to favor them. Leith, Helen, and Benedict evince neither a glimmer of irony or humor nor a moment of petulance; they are almost suffocatingly admirable.
As Leith navigates the war-haunted terrains of Asia, Hazzard interweaves poetic reminiscence with an almost documentary directness, informing us of Leith's past, vicissitudes of family and romance, his wartime nightmares and philosophical disquisitions … Throughout The Great Fire, Hazzard exacts a perfect sense of verisimilitude. For instance, a reader truly comprehends, almost physically, how time passes, whether in the transit of a letter or a ship, certainly in the act of waiting. Waiting at the radio for news. Waiting for the war to end. Waiting for life to begin again. Yet Hazzard does not antique her prose with nostalgia but rather lets us experience quotidian life or dramatic events with vivid immediacy. Hazzard, in other words, is an ‘old-fashioned’ writer; her transitions of plot are seamless rather than choppily cinematic, every page a deep pleasure to read.
The Great Fire, Hazzard's fourth novel, is her first since her masterpiece, The Transit of Venus, appeared more than 20 years ago. Her new book is a worthy successor, if not quite as expansive or technically astonishing. In it, Hazzard returns to the broken postwar world, in which victors and defeated are equally devastated and demoralized … Hazzard's prose is crisp and whittled, sometimes even cryptic. We never get a fully fleshed story of Leith's heroics, nor of the mysterious mentor, a former Japanese prisoner who, on his deathbed, presciently foretells Leith's passage back to a personal life. Horrors are hinted at but never dwelt upon. Hazzard revels in oblique distillation, but she is by no means a minimalist. Her sentences are rich in clauses, and her observations run deep, as do her characters' self-awareness and interior lives.
As sweetly as Ms Hazzard evokes the thwarted romance, it is hard for her backdrop not to steal the show. The time is marked by unease. Peace is nominal. The civil war is roiling in China. A confrontation between America and the Soviet Union threatens yet a third world war that these exhausted characters haven't the energy to contemplate. The conquerors in Japan are tainted by guilt over the bomb and by contempt for their charges … Though sporting an unusually large cast, The Great Fire never feels crowded. While hopscotching between Japan, Hong Kong, Britain and New Zealand, the novel maintains a remarkable sense of geographical unity—as if, after a world war of such dimension, anywhere on the planet begins to feel, depressingly, like the same place.
Add Shirley Hazzard's new novel to the shelf of haunting post-war stories. The Great Fire smolders in the aftermath of World War II, when the ashes of that calamity threatened to flash back into flame or choke estranged survivors … Her story comes into focus two years after the destruction of Hiroshima. The war is over, but the peace is hardly satisfying, leaving a world grimy, lame, and troubled by rumors of resuming conflict … Hazzard writes with an extraordinary command of geography and time, moving around the world to gather fleeting but arresting impressions of fascism in Italy, battle in Germany, and defeat in Japan – all the shattering chaos that through a million permutations has brought Leith into the company of these two ethereal siblings.
Heaving into peacetime with a numb heart and an eye for conspiracy, Hazzard's hero falls desperately in love with the young daughter of a British brigadier. Touring Japan, he notes how a defeated nation gathers itself in peacetime, secretly aware that to endure peacetime he must do the same thing … For all its spine-tingling finery, the novel is an often dense read. Hazzard's characters speak to another of the global theater in tones so formal you'd think they were sitting at a Council on Foreign Relations roundtable, rather than chatting over a gin and tonic. Even more baffling, she will often switch between two characters in one chapter, so that it's hard to tell who is speaking. Given the subtleties of their conversations, it's important to know where Leith and Exley stand.
The ‘Great Fire’ of the title is World War II. The pain, disruption and loss caused by such a conflagration as a war is explored in the lives of Hazzard's characters: Aldred Leith and, to a lesser extent, Peter Exley. They have survived: changed, wary, solitary. Both men are making tentative steps toward a future as yet unimagined … How to make a life in an uncertain, quixotic and dangerous world? Hazzard knows that world well: its geography, both interior and exterior. The Great Fire is a masterful rendering of the hopes and terrors experienced by those annealed in the fire.
Hazzard is capable of displaying more casual intelligence in a sentence or paragraph than some novels might achieve in a chapter...but her magnificent voice, which in Transit of Venus assumed a tenor of authority, has taken on an imperious quality here; stylistic quirks – half-sentences and tangential hypotheses – now sound weary as often as they do well conceived. The effect can be specifically dazzling but wholly episodic, even with the straightforward love story at the novel's center … While the burgeoning affair between Helen and Leith is gratifying in a sort of tweedy, warm-hearth way, it also strains the contemporary imagination to accept it wholeheartedly, without irony or foreboding. But that's how Hazzard has chosen to present her lovers, their farewell to arms being a sort of fair trade for having lived through horror and loss. One is left with a rather gauzy sense of consequence, more contrived and thin than its larger subject requires.
...both timely and timeless. The timeliness is rooted in the book's focus on the aftermath of war, in this case World War II, and the responsibilities and burdens of its victors. Much of the action takes place in Japan, in Kure, near Hiroshima, where the book's protagonist, Aldred Leith, a decorated British war hero and the scion of an eminent novelist, has come to write a politically sensitive account of the occupation … The title, of course, refers to the war just past, and perhaps most immediately to the fires of Hiroshima and the Blitz, but it also evokes the Great Fire of London, a devastating cataclysm for the capital that nonetheless presaged an opportunity for rebirth and beauty. That possibility of rebirth lies off the page at the end of The Great Fire – there are stirrings of hope, the book has too much integrity to offer more – but the beauty is felt in almost every line of this austerely gorgeous work.
The irony of ‘conquest’ is expressed with matchless clarity and grace, as military idealism reaps what it has sown, Aldred stoically bears scars inflicted by ‘the great fire into which his times had pitched him,’ things fall clamorously apart, and several ‘heroes’ and ‘rescuers’ recognize the bitter truth of the ‘Chinese maxim whereby one becomes responsible for the life one saves.’ And all this is communicated in a chiseled prose that makes the pages shimmer, many shaped with the concentrated intensity of poetry.
