The Great Fire
By Shirley Hazzard
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 278 pages, $24
It has been a long time–more than 20 years–since Shirley Hazzard’s last novel, the luminous “Transit of Venus,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1980; her marvelous new fiction, “The Great Fire,” is 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. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, Leith’s Australian friend Peter Exley pursues that other postwar preoccupation, not reconstruction but retribution, in the form of the prosecution of Japanese war criminals.
Hazzard, who worked for the United Nations for a decade in the 1950s and ’60s and has since written fiction and trenchantly critical non-fiction about the institution, has an insider’s grasp of the clumsy bureaucracy of occupation. Her most sympathetic characters–like Leith and Exley, abashed and embarrassed to be conquerors–struggle to adapt from soldiering to their new roles: ” ‘Peace forces us to invent our future selves,’ ” Leith writes to his friend. Hazzard’s villains–like Brig. Driscoll, the commander of the base at Kure and the father of the girl Leith falls in love with–are petty egotists, fighting turf battles instead of wars, looking only to the past and the remnants of empire, “The encrusted underside of glory” as Exley thinks of it.
Upon this sweeping and acutely evoked backdrop, Hazzard paints an intimate portrait of her characters’ lives and of conquests less military than romantic. Here, too, though, her male protagonists struggle with their responsibilities in lopsided power relationships.
Leith is besotted by Helen Driscoll, a captivating 17-year-old almost half his age. He is charmed by her at the same time he is filled with misgivings–because of her parents’ opposition and because he, in one of the novel’s many subtle parallels, is himself the bruised veteran of a youthful affair with a much older woman who eventually deserted him for his father.
Exley, for his part, pursues more tepidly an equivocal relationship with Rita Xavier, a Eurasian secretary in his office. Helen and Rita occupy liminal social spaces–between childhood and womanhood, between two races–and both seem to serve as avatars of their age, a period of social flux and realignment in the wake of the war.
There are marvels to admire in Hazzard’s writing, including an arresting eye for detail (whether it be a yawn that makes “a grotto” of a man’s face or “the smell of freshly cut cotton”) and a kind of exhausted, burned-out toughness that is filled with emotion yet is staunchly unsentimental for a book so freighted with love (observing the wedding of a co-worker, Exley notes, “How often one could be bored and moved at the same time”).
Among all these pleasures, it’s the novel’s uncanny conjuring of place and period that’s perhaps most enthralling. Hazzard offers a vivid evocation of several locations, Japan and Hong Kong to be sure, but also Australia–home to Exley and Helen–and London. Hazzard, born in Sydney in 1931, has lived in many of her settings in the course of a well-traveled life and now divides her time between New York and Capri (Italy is featured in several rich flashbacks to Leith’s youth). But she clearly retains an acerbic sense of her homeland. Her compatriot Exley, she writes, “had been raised on the Australian myths of desecration–on tales of fabulous vomiting into glove compartments or punch bowls, of silence ruptured by obscene sound: the legends of forlorn men avenging themselves on an empty continent, which, in its vast removal, did not hear or judge them.” Exley is in flight from this boorish world of “a beer and a jeer” but doubts his ability to make his way in the center of things, London.
This same poignant strain of colonial estrangement, the sense of exile at the edges of empire, hangs over the final third of the novel, when Helen is removed to New Zealand while Leith returns to England and its capital, the now slowing heart of the world.
“London, in the cold spring of 1948,” Hazzard observes, “was as shabby and sombre as in wartime, and greatly scarred–deliverance being marked, by night, in the old honeycomb of lights and, by day, in a cooling of purpose as the populace awaited some suggestion of good times.” As one of Leith’s former lovers notes, with perfect sang-froid, ” ‘Endurance, our national god, may be running out of steam at last.’ “
It’s in this final third of the novel, too, that its timeless quality is most felt. Even as it faithfully captures the postwar anticlimax and the enervated last days of the British empire, its depiction of partings and distant travel–in particular Leith’s circuitous journeyings home from a distant war–inevitably echoes and recalls Homer’s “Odyssey.”
There are risks to this. The novel in its ambitious geographical sweep–the characters are scattered as far as California and Kenya–seems at times fragmentary, and the reader may grow travel weary. Ultimately, however, this far-flung globe-trotting allows Hazzard to depict, with steadily accumulating force, not one nation in flux but a whole world poised on the brink of change (while incidentally also showcasing her effortless skill in evoking voice in the letters that pass between the characters–letters in which they seem more themselves even than in their at-times-guarded, socially trammeled dialogue).
” ‘[A]bout large subjects,’ ” Leith tells Helen early on as they discuss Carlyle, ” ‘there can be many kinds of books, playing on our sympathies or alienating them. Truth can be a synthesis, or an impression.’ ” While “The Great Fire” is an impressionistic book, it’s also an undeniably impressive synthesis, an intimate yet also far-reaching picture of a world order on the verge of being reordered. 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.
