The Great Fire

by Shirley Hazzard

The year is 1947. The great fire of the Second World War has convulsed Europe and Asia. In its wake, Aldred Leith, an acclaimed hero of the conflict, has spent two years in China at work on an account of world-transforming change there. Son of a famed and sexually ruthless novelist, Leith begins to resist his own self-sufficiency nurtured by war. Peter Exley, another veteran and an art historian by training, is prosecuting war crimes committed by the Japanese. Both men have narrowly escaped death in battle, and Leith saved Exley's life. The men have maintained long-distance friendship in a postwar loneliness that haunts them both, and which has swallowed Exley whole. Now in their thirties, with their youth behind them and their world in ruins, both must invent the future and retrieve a private humanity.

Arriving in Occupied Japan to record the effects of the bomb in Hiroshima, Leith meets Benedict and Helen Driscoll, the Australian son and daughter of a tyrannical medical administrator. Benedict, at twenty, is doomed by a rare degenerative disease. Helen, still younger, is inseparable from her brother. Precocious, brilliant, sensitive, at home in the books they read together, these two have been, in Leith's words, delivered by literature. The young people capture Leith's sympathy; indeed, he finds himself struggling with his attraction to this girl whose feelings are as intense as his own and from whom he will soon be fatefully parted.

A deeply observed story of love and separation, of disillusion and recovered humanity, The Great Fire marks the much-awaited return to fiction of an author whose novel The Transit of Venus won the National Book Critics Circle Award and, twenty years after its publication, is considered a modern classic.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Australia, Japan, War, Literary Fiction, Historical

278 pages, Hardcover

First published October 14, 2003

About the author

Shirley Hazzard was born in Australia, and as a child travelled the world due to her parents’ diplomatic postings. At age 16, she began working for British Combined Intelligence Services in Hong Kong, monitoring civil war in China. After her family moved to New York City, she worked for several years as a typist at the United Nations Secretariat in New York.

After leaving this post, she became a full-time writer and a passionate opponent of the United Nations, the subject of several of her nonfiction books.

Known for elegant and controlled writing, Hazzard’s works of fiction include five novels. Her last novel, The Great Fire, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

First thing to say is what a stunningly beautifully written book this is. And it's also a poignantly romantic book. The backdrop is the devastation caused by WW2. It begins in Japan in 1947 where Aldred Leith is about to visit Hiroshima. I forget exactly what his job was but he's still in the army and was decorated during the war for bravery. He has his scars. In Japan he meets a young Australian brother and sister. The boy Ben is dying of an incurable illness. The girl Helen is beautiful and Aldred falls in love with her despite her young age (17). Her narrow minded military father disapproves of Aldred. Soon they are separated. There are lots of stories within stories in this novel and occasionally the narrative shifts to other characters from Aldred's past. We discover he is a bit of a cad with a history of failed relationships including a very brief marriage. Suddenly, it's not looking so good for Helen who has been taken to New Zealand while her beloved dying brother has been removed to America. I guess the troubling aspect of this narrative is that you begin to fear for Helen and allow in a hope she finds someone else which is odd because the author has set up her relationship with Aldred as one of those once in a lifetime great loves and Aldred is likeable. She sustains the tension until virtually the last page.

[Simon Cleveland · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Dorie - Cats&Books :) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The time frame for this historical novel is 1947-48, taking place primarily in East Asia, soon after the end of WWII. Ms. Hazzard paints a panorama of a world ravaged by war through her flowing prose and with great descriptive clarity.

At the heart of the story is Aldred Leith, who is English, and has come to chart the physical damage incurred throughout the war, particularly in Hiroshima. He finds not only physical but great psychological damage to the prideful Japanese people.

In time he falls in love with a young girl living in occupied Japan who is caring for her physically disabled brother. Employing parallel narratives, we meet Aldred's Australian friend Peter Exley who is investigating Japanese war crimes in Hong Kong. Exley is facing a life altering decision as to what to do with the rest of his life.

I was emotionally drawn into this novel and couldn't put it down. Many of the feelings of sadness and soulful turmoil by rescuers and heroes can be applied to our world's current situation. A quote from the book sums it up as "the Chinese maxim whereby one becomes responsible for the life one saves", certainly applies to our situation in Iraq.

I highly recommend this book.

(read in 2003)

[Quo · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard gives the impression of a novel where the author never came to know her own characters, except perhaps on a clipboard. There are many reviews heralding the book & its author but even with a gestation process of some 20 years, the tale seems unfinished. More than the attempt to capture the feeling of WWII's aftermath on a variety of characters who experienced the war in Asia, they all seem rather static & voiceless.



Or rather, many of them speak with an identical voice, perhaps that of an author who was unable to properly animate the characters, to liberate them from her own consciousness.

In reading the story of 32 year-old Aldred Leith, bearing physical as well as psychic battle scars & his encounters with others in the novel, I had great difficulty visualizing him, especially since his interactions with others seem at a great distance. Some of his characteristics are revealed in the form of written correspondence but even in the presence of a 17 year old girl named Helen Driscoll, someone who become Leith's beloved, their words seem as stilted when they are together as when they craft letters to each other.

The question becomes one of deciding whether the reference to the "Great Fire" is meant to convey the terrible battles of WWII, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima & Nagasaki, with much of the novel set in post-war Japan, or the suggestion of a latent, very guarded romantic feeling between Aldred & Helen. To my mind, the only real passion I comprehended was an equally guarded one between Aldred Leith and another ex-soldier named Peter Exley, particularly since they seem to speak with interchangeable voices.

Aldred is the son of a well-published British author named Oliver Leith, a man "known for his detachment", someone seemingly held at both an emotional & a geographic distance from his son. They do however share the same mistress, but not at the same time and even the discussion of the 6 month intimate relationship between a younger Aldred & Aurora (later his father's lover), lacks any semblance of passion. Aurora may not have been properly cast for a "Mrs. Robinson role" but she seemed at least a potentially interesting character who is never given a real voice.



Not to be dismissive of the author but one wonders if the lack of passion is because Shirley Hazard was still drafting the book into her 70s or because she had even greater difficulty uncovering the voices of the males in the novel than the female characters.

In a talk to the readers of my village who had chosen Let The Great World Spin as it as the "One Book" choice to be read & discussed a few years ago, Colum McCann indicated that he had the characters in place for the novel but was unable to craft their voices. At this point, the author mentioned that he rode a bicycle 12,000 miles across the U.S., Canada & into Mexico listening to the stories of those he encountered, making notes to later be used to fully populate the characters of his unfinished novel with authentic voices.

My appraisal is that nothing similar happened with The Great Fire, where the voices all seemed over-starched, almost like statues, never stirring the reader, let alone acting with anything akin to a forceful rather than a robotic manner.

Here are just a few of the phrasings that I found ranged from the overly formal to the nonsensical:

Something carnal was not incompatible with sensibility.

Now consciousness devolved on each event in turn, as if the episodes considered over years were being dismissed one by one, people throughout the world reconsuming their experience, over & over: memory, regret, ideas, pleasures, hurrying like caged mice. What emanates from crowds as seething.

But she dreaded these death sentences that came to her as if from the perspective of future years: the antipodean consolation of having once touched infinity. As if, in age, she looked back to the exotic evenings when she had bowled along in a chariot, singing about the Foggy Dew.

Fairness rolled over him again, like fog. Evasion, after all took many forms: in her, repressiveness; and, in himself, the general amnesty for humankind.

Admittedly, I offer these sentences without context but there is often a general sense that the words are not really meant to relate to characters or to situations, putting the reader at a great distance from the author's intent. Beyond that, the novel is set partly in Japan but without any feeling of Japanese people or their food, clothes, their feelings about defeat, etc., perhaps merely recreating vague memories of the author's time there ages before.

Neither is there any real reaction to the devastation of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities. We are also taken to China at a time when Mao is crossing swords with Chang Kai Shek, with the future of that country in the balance but the critical confrontation is merely alluded to & then dropped completely. And yet, with a scene placed in New Zealand, the author chooses to name specific stores & streets of little consequence to most readers.



I did enjoy the loving relationship between young Helen Driscoll & her critically ill but very precocious brother Ben, though their parents are once again mostly off in the distance, eventually severing the bond between the two siblings & leaving the family adrift when the boy is suddenly carted off by ship to take part in an experimental treatment on the west coast of America & dying alone far from his family.

While there is a kind of reunion of Helen & the main character Aldred at novel's end, it seems as estranged as do most of the characters from each other & as was this reader from the framework of the story.

After reading The Great Fire, I am not unmoved by some of the very positive comments from both professional reviewers & those at G/R but I wonder if they are not relying on the memory of some of Ms. Hazzard's earlier works. With those are the unflinchingly buoyant reviews by the Ann Pachetts of the literary world, listed on the book's cover & end-papers, the words of folks who would not dare be critical of a fellow author, who might in turn review one of their own future books.

A reviewer for the esteemed New Yorker indicates that "hierarchies of feelings, perceptions & taste abound in Shirley Hazzard's writing". However, in my own view, this novel is poorly constructed, peopled with quite undernourished characters and full of words & phrasings that make the book seem like a rather poor translation.

*Within my review, a trio of images of author Shirley Hazzard.

[Luther Obrock · Rating 1 out of 5]

Although I find this book terrible on many levels, I must start by saying that Shirley Hazzard is a good writer. Actually an excellent writer. Looking back on my experience reading the book, I have to say that I often enjoyed the beautiful phrasing long enough to forget what a terrible book this actually is. (as a side note concerning Ms. Hazzards language, if any Australians or New Zealanders happen to read this review, please let me know if you actually use the word "Antipodean" to describe yourselves)

That out of the way, I must say, this book is a pompous piece of bombastic trash, the kind of trash that book reviewers seem to love. Its easy to see why. Lets break down the book. The world before the great conflagration of World War Two was a nice place for people like Leith. The world was run by rich educated, and oh so English people. They had parties in which they talked about the humanities and had affairs with others who dressed well and talked about literature. They owned nice houses outside of Hong Kong. When they weren't residing in those houses, they stayed at nice hotels for white people.

Ok, yes, you may (and should) object to my characterization. That is not what the book is about! And I totally agree. My point is that Hazzard, like a Merchant and Ivory film glamorizes colonialism and the colonial project to such an extent that for her, the picturesque colonial days (happily devoid of any, you know, Asians), come to represent the apogee of civilization, and the post war era, run by Australians and, ugh! Americans, is boorish and depressing.

This beautifully written book invents a fiction which the literate types seem to love. The colonial days were a great time for literate types. In this simplistic sketch, I hope only to point out Hazzards vision of the colonialism, war, and society does nothing but play to the romantic fiction of a world order in which people like her were on top and in charge.

[Violet wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful inspired descriptive prose ultimately betrayed for me by the failure of the writer to fully imagine the character of Helen who throughout the novel came across as the wish fulfillment of an elderly woman rather than any kind of authentic seventeen year old girl and as such seeped way too much sentimentality into the structure of the novel. It ends up a bit like The English Patient crossdressing as Mills & Boon. But the writing is stunning, wise and poignant and relentlessly at high tide.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for a discussion in the 21st Century Literature group, which I don't want to preempt. It is my second Hazzard novel - I read The Transit of Venus earlier this year, which was impressive, and this one is almost as good.

It is a bit of a slow burner - there is rather a lot of introductory preamble introducing all of the characters and establishing their situations before the story really gets going.

The book is set in 1947, in a world in which the scars of the Second World War are still fresh. At the start we meet Aldred Leith, a recently divorced British soldier and war hero with a famous writer father, as he travels to Kure near Hiroshima for a military posting to observe the effects of the bomb.

In Kure Aldred is billeted with an Australian officer, his wife and their two children - Benedict, who is increasingly paralysed by a fatal illness and Helen, who is 17 and very close to Benedict. Both are well read and clever, and Aldred befriends both, and soon falls for Helen, despite his misgivings about her age and the need to hide it from the disapproving and over-protective parents. This love story drives much of the plot, and like most love stories there are plenty of obstacles.

In some ways the digressions are more interesting - Aldred has a friend in Hong Kong, which increases the scope of the political element of the novel. All of the main characters have to fight for fulfilment in a very uncertain world.

Incidentally football fans who remember the late 70s and early 80s may be amused to find a minor character called Brian Talbot - it is very unlikely that this coincidence was deliberate!

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shirley Hazzard never wastes a word. Her sentences contain worlds, her paragraphs paint portraits of the settings and people; you not only experience smells, tastes and sounds, but crawl inside the minds of her characters.
I won't give a plot synopsis, as it's much too complicated and involved, but suffice it to say that you will be swept away in the lives and loves of these characters, even the minor ones that you come to know briefly in passing. I'm sure I will spend future time and thought wondering what has become of Aldred and Helen, and the myriad others I met here. I surely wish them well.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

"The Transit of Venus" eventually won me over, despite occasional frustration with Shirely Hazzard's mannered and oblique style. But there were relatively few rewards for plodding through this disappointing effort. Hazzard's account of the romance between war veteran Aldred Leith and 17-year old Helen Driscoll spans a large canvas, both geographically and historically - the action unfolds from Hiroshima and Hong Kong to London and Wellington, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, still a time of great political and personal instability.

This choice of backdrop for the central love story suggests a certain ambition on Hazzard's part - this is not meant to be just your average star-crossed love story. No, this is about love in tumultuous times, and the romance of Aldred and Helen is presented as more portentous somehow because it unfolds in a world which has been ripped apart and is still stumbling towards a new order.

I wish I could say that Hazzard has been successful. Certainly, the book garnered more than its share of critical acclaim ("hypnotic", "brilliant", "stunning", "dazzling" say Ann Patchett, Joan Didion, while Anita Shreve is moved to such excesses as "transcendent", "sublime", and "touching infinity"). These are not the adjectives I would have chosen to describe what is, charitably viewed, nothing more than a slightly better written version of "The Bridges of Madison County". By which I mean that Hazzard is skilled enough to avoid the kind of hilarious linguistic atrocities that were littered throughout Waller's book.

But does she have anything more interesting to say than Waller? Not really. Aldred and Helen are possibly two of the dullest protagonists you'll ever come across. Implausibly noble and sensitive, they are cast straight from the same phoney mold as Francesca and Robert over there in Madison County. Which makes "The Great Fire" a love story that is impossible to take seriously, despite Hazzard's bombastic efforts to convince us that Aldred and Helen are cut from some kind of super-special cloth.

They are endlessly fascinating to each other, of course, and the reader is obviously meant to find them charming as all get out. To this end, Hazzard makes a point of reminding us on every other page that
(a) they read books and discuss art and big profound ideas
(b) Aldred is brave and noble
(c) Helen is wise beyond her years,
while further stacking the deck by surrounding them with an assortment of cartoonishly yobbish, nasty, colonial caricatures of vulgar insensitivity.

Oh, and yes -- Helen comes equipped with a delicate, saintly, terminally ill, sagelike, older brother, who dies obligingly on cue, while Aldred has a neurotic, ineffectual wartime friend Peter, to underscore his own manly, heroic nobility and general sensitive warrior qualities.

Aldred and Helen. Two of the noblest, most sensitive, caring, protagonists you could ever hope to meet. And two of the most boring.

Personally, I've never been a fan of hagiography. There's nothing like the odd weakness or character flaw to add depth and keep the reader interested. Give me the sodden moral ambiguity of one of Graham Green's whisky priests, or the cool amorality of Tom Ripley, over the nobility and sensitivity of Aldred Leith any day.

Readers looking to Hazzard for insights into the postwar milieu of South East Asia during the collapse of colonialism will also be disappointed. Other than some generalized hand-wringing about the horrors of war, she has little of interest to add. An omission that is particularly disappointing when one recalls Paul Scott's extraordinarily nuanced and sensitive account (The Raj Quartet) of events in India on the eve of its independence. By contrast, Hazzard's commentary on postwar developments in Asia seems superficial and uninformed.

Despite its rapturous critical reception, "The Great Fire" seemed entirely pedestrian to me, peopled with characters that remained oddly two-dimensional and consequently unaffecting.

[Peter · Rating 1 out of 5]

This novel is set mainly in Japan and Hong Kong after the Second World War and (apparently) deals with the dissolution of the colonial world and with post-war societal and personal transformation in general. I found the narration strangely cryptic and incoherent in places, language and style often pompous for no apparent reason. The main problem, though, is the description of Aldred Leith’s (main protagonist) relationship with the Driscoll children: precious, almost Dickensian, especially his infatuation with teenage Helen. I cannot believe this book won prestigious awards both in Australia and the USA. I gave up about two thirds through.

[James Barker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Often when I open up the Goodreads app I am faced with a quote by Tracy Chevalier that says, ‘I have consistently loved books that I’ve read when I’ve been sick in bed.’ It always reminds me of reading ‘The Girl with the Pearl Earring’ a number of years ago while lying on a couch, covered by blankets, drinking Lucozade. Ironically I did not ‘love’ the book but it certainly reminds me of sickness.

So, too, with ‘The Great Fire.’ I have consumed it over 2 days while dealing with that dire malady, Man-Flu. In fact it is a quite fitting state of mind as the novel takes place in the aftermath of WWII; the world and its people are faced with the after effects of the sickness that is war. Peace has taken everyone by surprise. The blank faces of trauma are everywhere.

It starts powerfully enough in defeated Japan close to the site of Hiroshima. Hazzard writes dense, descriptive prose that offers a window on this world of Hell. Hazzard travelled extensively with her parents through Asia immediately after the war and you do get a sense that her writing is informed by her experiences rather than an exercise in imagination. Her style reminds me of Graham Greene in the novels of his that were not ‘entertainments.’ And Hazzard was indeed close friends with Greene. She even alludes to one of his works when the protagonist, Aldred Leith, buys a book from an up and coming writer set in West Africa. As this is 1947 it is almost certainly ‘The Heart of the Matter,’ albeit a year too soon.

Aldred is a war veteran who has received great honours (as well as war wounds) and has become known as the go-to man for state-of-nation style analyses. He has walked across China at the end of the war and is now considering the vanquished Japanese. This leads him to a place that has Kurtz-like potentialities (sadly not fulfilled), where he meets an ailing boy and the boy’s ‘changeling’ of a sister who becomes, despite her age, the love interest.

There are also forays into Hong Kong, England and New Zealand, all described with remarkable skill. A subplot involving Aldred’s friend, Peter Exley, starts well but fizzles out rather prematurely, as if the writer wrote herself into a cul-de-sac and decided to leave her car parked there. In fact the whole novel rather loses its way in its final third and while, overall, there is powerful psychological writing, there is a sense of sameness to characters’ reactions that made me think of a writer putting words into her creations’ mouths, always something of a disappointment.

I bought this book years ago (along with ‘The Transit of Venus’) as I had read that Hazzard is one of the greatest writers in the English language today. But it got supplanted in my reading pile by books I considered more important. I will be reading more of the writer’s work but am in no hurry... A quite
damning sentiment.

[Ron Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

War is hell, but victory is lonelier. Vietnam vets were the first to be diagnosed with "post-traumatic stress," but Hemingway described the disaffection after battle almost half a century before in "The Sun Also Rises." Warriors have had trouble returning home since the The Odyssey.

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.

It's been 23 years since her previous novel, "The Transit of Venus," won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The careful poetry of "The Great Fire" suggests that perfectionism rather than writer's block consumed those two decades. In fact, the hiatus seems to have extracted Hazzard from the movement of contemporary literature and enabled her to produce a strikingly timeless novel with an aura of aged profundity.

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. "In the wake of so much death," she writes, "the necessity to assemble life became both urgent and oppressive."

One of the many victors challenged by that necessity is Aldred Leith, a 32-year-old war hero, who's been wandering through the new peace like a man inspecting a burned cathedral. "I feel pursued," he tells a friend, "by evocations of wartime violence, unexorcised." Divorced from a war bride he never really knew and distant from his reserved parents, Leith comes to Japan to record the obliteration of an ancient culture.

"He had spoken with many persons grieved and embittered by ruin, and by the gross ambiguities of their liberation; and related these matters with simplicity and truth." Though we read almost none of Leith's report, Hazzard's narrative is steeped in gorgeous, tragic visions of Asia after the war along with the most careful parsing of Leith's uneasiness about playing conqueror amid the ashes of Hiroshima.

As a decorated soldier in the British army with a publishing assignment from a French general, he enjoys a rare kind of autonomy in this territory now firmly controlled by America. Autonomy, though, is a quality he's had enough of. "As war was ending, he had intended to create for himself a fixed point, some centre from which departures might be made," but two years later he is still "at an immense distance from anything resembling home."

Surprisingly, he finds refuge as a lodger on an island off the mainland where he stays during his observations. His hosts, a brusque Australian administrator and his bitter wife, "were disquieting as a symptom of new power," Leith thinks wryly. Living with them "did not even seem a cessation of hostilities."

But their son and daughter infuse his life with oxygen. Like Leith, Ben and Helen have suffered and benefited from isolation. Shipped around the world to avoid running into war or burdening their parents, these two siblings sound like characters written by Louisa May Alcott, the effect of having no company but each other and a collection of 19th-century novels.

Cloistered in their rooms with this dashing and modest war hero during hot afternoons, Ben and Helen feel as though they've discovered another fascinating narrator. Charming, openly affectionate, and searingly perceptive, they're just the sort of people Leith needs to nurse him back into the habits of affection.

However, two problems threaten this oasis in the ruins of war: First, Ben is rapidly declining under the effects of a chronic illness, which his parents alternately ignore and resent. Second, Leith feels he mustn't pursue his love for Helen because, at 17, she's almost half his age. And yet, as Ben's health fails and Leith's desire grows, the three of them conspire against death and parents to devise some way to stay together. "Having expected, repeatedly to die from the great fires into which this time had pitched him," Hazzard writes, "Leith had recovered a great desire to live completely; by which he meant, with her."

Several stories develop alongside this one, involving Leith's friends and relations, all uncertain about how to reconstruct a life in the silence of peace. His best friend pursues war criminals in Hong Kong, but can't stand up to his parents. Back home in Britain, Leith meets an old lover who later became his father's mistress, a woman now suspended alone between her scruples and her shamelessness.

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.

Flashes of violence cut through the contemplative narrative, but in her exquisitely cut sentences, Hazzard concentrates on the subtler movements of these hearts cauterized by violence. Her story is eerily quiet, filled with despair but also traces of hope, caught indirectly, as astronomers locate dark matter by the way it bends light.

In a novel that would collapse under the weight of pretension if a line were mislaid, Hazzard keeps this romance aloft by virtue of her refined sentiment and an illuminating understanding of human nature. Against the backdrop of a world stunned by the most appalling obscenities, the affection between Leith and Helen glows with a kind of unearthly luminescence.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1002/p1...

[Charles Matthews · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Barb H · Rating 4 out of 5]

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!

[None Ofyourbusiness Loves Israel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aldred Leith, a distinguished British war hero and budding author, arrives in Japan in 1947 to document the aftermath of the atomic bomb. Burdened with the scars of conflict and a loveless past, he encounters the Driscoll siblings, Benedict and Helen. Benedict, a young man suffering from a terminal illness, and Helen, his devoted sister, become central to Leith's journey. Despite the considerable age difference, Leith and Helen form a profound bond, challenging societal norms and personal hesitations.

As Leith grapples with his growing feelings for Helen, he is also haunted by his wartime experiences and the pervasive sense of loss that shadows the postwar world. His friendship with Peter Exley, an Australian army lawyer investigating Japanese war crimes, adds another layer to the narrative. Exley's own struggles with postwar disillusionment and his pursuit of justice mirror Leith's internal conflicts. Their intertwined stories illuminate the complexities of rebuilding lives in the wake of immense destruction.

Hazzard's prose is both lyrical and exquisite, as many reviewers have noted. It sheds light on the individuals who witnessed these momentous events, offering a perspective that, despite their historical significance, has rarely been explored with such depth and sensitivity.

[zed · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wrote that author Shirley Hazards previous novel, The Transit of Venus, was a book “…about Love but not in the cloying way I should imagine a Mills and Boons Novel being.” This, The Great Fire, is not far removed from that statement. Where the former was for me about the “transient nature and the morality of (Love) as a weapon” this book is about Love as a power to transform after trauma, in this case the events in WW2 and family bereavement. The prose is exceptional and that is the strength of the novel as the plot is fairly thin. That has been what has surprised me in reading both of Hazards 2 novels. Surprise that I can be dragged into them when the subject would hardly be my choice generally. But in the end the skinny plot did not save me from marking down the book in a comparison with The Transit of Venus. That book is to reread to discover the hidden secrets and meanings. This one less so.
Winner of 2004 Miles Franklin Award and probably deservedly. Just not my kind of book.

[Suzy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an exquisitely written book about the aftermath of war told through one person's story. Aldred Leith, English gentleman and injured war hero in the European theater during WWII, now finds himself in 1947 Japan ostensibly to study the repercussions of the A-bomb in Hiroshima. He has just completed a 2-year walk-around of China in order to write a book he's been commissioned to about the state of that country and how it might lead to the next war. In his 30's, he meets a teenage girl, Helen, and her 20ish brother who is dying from Ataxia, when he ends up living in a compound with their (horrible) parents. He is immediately seduced by both of these young people, especially Helen, and they move in and out of his life throughout the book.

And that's just the jumping off point! My impression from this book is an intimate understanding of the dislocation and disruption caused by war and how a person's experiences and disorientation are amplified by it. Leith has some tasks to do (writing the book about China), but he is asking himself some big questions - who am I now? where do I belong in the world? who do I belong with? We learn a lot about his past through reminiscences and we speculate about the future along with him as he ruminates about where life will take him.

There is so much packed into this book! Lots of toing and froing both literally and in the minds of the characters. And so many people to keep track of! At one point an Audrey Fellowes gets a lot of attention, and I kept saying "who the heck is Audrey Fellowes?!" and had to backtrack to find out. No wonder I had to abandon the audiobook and get a print copy. Lots of toing and froing for me too in the book. At times I was exhilarated by what was going on and at times I felt the book meandered. There was always a sense of foreboding in Leith's speculations about his future. The ending seems to resolve some of his questions, but can we actually trust that things have been settled? The ending was satisfying nonetheless, but kept me playing out possible scenarios after finishing the book.

My favorite bookish podcast had an early episode on The Great Fire which was delightful to listen to. (discussion starts about 17:00) Listening to it made me realize that Hazzard created a sense of dislocation and disorientation in the reader by the way she wrote this story, so we felt it viscerally as well as seeing it with our eyes. Brilliant!

Why I'm reading this: This is the September group read for the 21st Century Literature group.

[Claire Fuller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been on my bookshelves, unread, for at least ten years. I think I may have started it and given up after a short way. I can understand why, even though I gave it 5-stars this time around. It's the story of 32 year old man, living in Japan after the end of the second world war who is writing an account of that country. While there he meets an Australian girl who is just seventeen and they fall in love. We also follow the man's friend who lives in Hong Kong and is bringing perpetrators of war crimes to justice. It's a love story really, with the recent war as a backdrop, reflecting and affecting everyone's lives. The story also stops in England and in Australia, but Japan and Hong Kong are the two main countries (and I was pleased when one character goes to dinner in Flagstaff House, which is now a tea museum that I visited when in Hong Kong last year for the literature festival). I enjoyed the story, but it's the language that I struggled with at first. The main character, and many others, speak like no one speaks in real life - long literary, beautiful sentences. Clearly this is deliberate by Hazzard. Perhaps it's just her style (this is the first novel I've read by her); but it did take some getting used to.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

The immediacy, the level of the writing, transcends what is ultimately a simple love story set during WW2 and taking place in Japan, China, England and New Zealand. Hazzard's descriptions and Nevil Shute-like tone, both restrained and with exhilarating bursts of sparkly recklessness, make this a joy.

[Keith · Rating 1 out of 5]

This a book that I had to read for my book club. It is in English, but hardly seems like it at times. Take this sentence as an example (my own creation): "While not quite thinking that the outside sky was truly blue, Elmo meandered into the edifice of goods" - meaning, Elmo went into the store. Does that created sentence even make sense? Think of an entire book written this way and you have the idea of what apparently constitutes 'Booker Prize' level of writing. The book reminds me of the two word joke 'Eschew Obfuscation'. There is a plot here, a very simple one and probably the only thing of substance in the story. It is a love story between and old army dude in Japan nearby Nagasaki - (The Great Fire) - but we learn nothing of what was going on there. All we can discern is the obscure crap covering up the love story between the old guy and some 14, 15 year old girl. Are you hooked yet? Don't waste your time!

[Julian Worker · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is yet another book in which the author's desire to appear clever and write deeply meaningful comments about the human condition get in the way of the story. There is an excessive amount of unnecessary description, exposition, and contemplation that continually took me out of the story.

The book is set after World War II where all those who have survived try to reclaim their humanity and make sense of what happened to themselves and to their family and friends.

Essentially, a brave soldier who has seen service during World War II meets a young girl and they fall in love in Hong Kong and Japan. They both want to be together but they're soon half a world apart, so something has to be done otherwise they'll end up losing each other, when they've each already lost so much.

[Jennifer · Rating 1 out of 5]

How this book won the National Book Award over "The Known World" (and "A Ship Made of Paper" even with its minor faults) is beyond me.

Women are left by the wayside in terms of character development. The story takes place after WWII and centers on two male characters. The writing is good and sometimes is so succinct that you may miss things that have happened. But the relationships aren't that intriguing, the dynamic between the father and lead protagonist is lacking (why wouldn't Leith care that his father had an affair with a woman he was having an affair with or not have any concern for his mother's feelings during this longterm adultery?), and the character of Peter Exley wasn't focused on very much by the end.

Leith's love interest, Helen, is portrayed as a young lovey-dovey girl that you may have read about in 19th or 18th century books by British authors where women were not fully fleshed out as beings.

I struggled to get through this book, but was determined to finish. It just didn't pull me in with the characters or situations. Even what the characters went through in the war was glossed over in snippets when that's what I'd like to know more about because of how it may (or may not) haunt them. C'est la vie. If I can finish this then I should have NO problems finally plugging through "Invisible Man".

[Denis · Rating 4 out of 5]

As beautiful as the painting that is used to illustrate the cover. Hazzard's writing is mesmerizing, and for that alone she totally deserved her prize. Such writing is pure art, it's literature at its best. The story happens to be as compelling and powerful, in a classic way that brings us back to a certain kind of Anglo-saxon tradition of story-telling.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm actually reading this for the 2nd time, something I rarely do. I'm really concentrating on the language and imagery this time and loving it even more than I did the first time. Yay, Shirley!

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exquisite.

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Men … feel compelled to test their fate: to learn, once and for all, who is master. The lesson is not always to their liking."

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Question: What could be worse than the horrors of the Second World War?
Answer: Its aftermath.

It is 1947, and war hero Major Aldred Leith is in Japan doing research on a book. He stays in a compound under two despicable fellow Aussies named Driscoll, husband and wife. Altogether different from their parents are their two "changeling" children, Benedict and Helen. The first is brilliant, but deathly ill; and his sister is almost always by his side. She is fifteen years old, but Aldred and she manage to fall in love.

They are separated by the parents, who take her off to New Zealand, and send the son to a medical specialist in California.

In the meantime, Aldred goes to England to pick up various threads in his life, such as his mother, his former lover, and a man who knew Helen when she was younger.

Throughout The Great Fire -- a reference to the war -- we see scores of characters, most of them fellow Aussies, who are trying to recover their lives, like one nameless character:

He got off at a country crossroad. Helen, at her bleared window, watched in walk away on a dirt track, smiling abstractedly and slightly swinging a string bag of small packages wrapped in newsprint. Even so, there was the antipodean touch of desolation: the path indistinguishable from all others, the wayside leaves flanneled with dust, the net bag. The walking into oblivion.

Shirley Hazzard's book entranced me during a difficult time in my own life, when I went through he roughest part of tax season with a broken shoulder and considerable pain.

Now, for the first time, I understand why, on my travels, I meet so many Australians and new Zealanders. Its that "antipodean touch of desolation," I suppose, that isolation from the rest of the world that must have seemed so daunting after that conflagration of war.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this novel for the exquisitely crafted prose. The sentences are understated, spare, austere, yet luscious. Unfortunately, the story itself is skeletal and the main characters with the exception of Aldred Leith thinly sketched. Also, all the characters think and speak in the same spare, luscious voice - which is perhaps believable for a war veteran of 33, but hardly for a 17 year old girl and her teenage brother. No matter how precocious they may be, teenagers don't have enough life experience to utter the wise sayings these munchkins do.

I would've liked to see more historical context - though the war looms huge, we see only its aftereffects on the emotions and psyches of the characters. Not much about the devastation of Hiroshima is delved into, although this is Leith's purpose for being in Japan. I guess the book is what it is. Maybe Hazzard excludes historical context from her repertoire.

It's a bummer how women are treated here; with one exception, they either endure lives of loneliness and quiet desperation, or are lovely exotic flowers destined to shrivel and die in their arid surroundings, or have learned from experience or the lack of desirable men to suppress their longings and hopes for the future.

[Jennifer · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not really that thrilled with this book. I read it because I had once found it on some "must read classics" list, but I also once read that Shirley Hazzard is a writer who thinks a little too much of her talent to write (I believe it was Stephen King) and that is what I get out of this book. Loosen up and tell a story - the long beautiful phrases mentioned by a previous review-writer are exactly what the book seems to be about. Oh, and there's some people doing some stuff, but very slowly and not very excitingly. Again, I love great writing, but have difficulty with arrogant writing, and that's what I believe this to be.

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

"The Transit of Venus" eventually won me over, despite occasional frustration with Shirely Hazzard's mannered and oblique style. But there were relatively few rewards for plodding through this disappointing effort. Hazzard's account of the romance between war veteran Aldred Leith and 17-year old Helen Driscoll spans a large canvas, both geographically and historically - the action unfolds from Hiroshima and Hong Kong to London and Wellington, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, still a time of great political and personal instability.

This choice of backdrop for the central love story suggests a certain ambition on Hazzard's part - this is not meant to be just your average star-crossed love story. No, this is about love in tumultuous times, and the romance of Aldred and Helen is presented as more portentous somehow because it unfolds in a world which has been ripped apart and
is still stumbling towards a new order.

I wish I could say that Hazzard had been successful. Certainly, the book garnered more than its share of critical acclaim ("hypnotic", "brilliant", "stunning", "dazzling" say Ann Patchett, Joan Didion, while Anita Shreve is moved to such excesses as "transcendent", "sublime", and "touching infinity"). These are not the adjectives I would have chosen to describe what is, charitably viewed, nothing more than a slightly better written version of "The Bridges of Madison County". By which I mean that Hazzard is skilled enough to avoid the kind of hilarious linguistic atrocities that were littered throughout Waller's book.

Does she have anything more interesting to say than Waller? Not really. Aldred and Helen are possibly two of the dullest protagonists you’ll ever come across. Implausibly noble and sensitive, they are cast straight from the same phoney mold as Francesca and Robert over there in Madison County. Which makes "The Great Fire" a love story that is impossible to take seriously, despite Hazzard's bombastic efforts to convince us that Aldred and Helen are cut from some kind of super-special cloth.

They are endlessly fascinating to each other, of course, and the reader is obviously meant to find them charming as all get out. To this end, Hazzard makes a point of reminding us on every other page that
(a) they read books and discuss art and big profound ideas
(b) Aldred is brave and noble
(c) Helen is wise beyond her years,
while further stacking the deck by surrounding them with an assortment of cartoonishly yobbish, nasty, colonial caricatures of vulgar insensitivity.
Oh, and yes -- Helen comes equipped with a delicate, saintly, terminally ill, sagelike, older brother, who dies obligingly on cue, while Aldred has a neurotic, ineffectual wartime friend Peter, to underscore his own manly, heroic nobility and general sensitive warrior qualities.

Aldred and Helen. Two of the noblest, most sensitive, caring, protagonists you could ever hope to meet. And two of the most boring.

Personally, I've never been a fan of hagiography. There's nothing like the odd weakness or character flaw to add depth and keep the reader interested. Give me the sodden moral ambiguity of one of Graham Green's whisky priests, or the cool amorality of Tom Ripley, over the nobility and sensitivity of Aldred Leith any day.

Readers looking to Hazzard for insights into the postwar milieu of South East Asia during the collapse of colonialism will also be disappointed. Other than some generalized hand-wringing about the horrors of war, she has little of interest to add. An omission that is particularly disappointing when one recalls Paul Scott's extraordinarily nuanced and sensitive account (The Raj Quartet) of events in India on the eve of its independence. By contrast, Hazzard's commentary on postwar developments in Asia seems superficial and uninformed.

Despite its rapturous critical reception, "The Great Fire" seemed entirely pedestrian to me, peopled with characters that remained oddly two-dimensional and consequently unaffecting. I had more fun reading "Skye O' Malley", the bodice-ripper featuring Ireland's legendary voluptuous Elizabethan pirate.

But the world is wide, and somewhere Aldred and Helen are living nobly, sensitively, happily, ever after, reading BOOKS and discussing big, profound ideas while the dignified family retainer serves them sherry in the library, cosily insulated from the common plebeian hordes of people like you and me that roam the earth in our vulgar, clodhopping fashion. Probably right down the road from Francesca and Robert, and Howard Roark. You all are imagining them in a villa in Tuscany somewhere. I'm betting that they end up in a gated community for snooty protagonists with attitude, in one of those creepy, radioactively glowing, houses created by that spiritual soulmate of Waller and (on the basis of this overwrought effort) Hazzard, Thomas Kinkade, the infamous "Painter of Light".

Shirley Hazzard: a writer who becomes less interesting, the more of her work you read.