Shirley Hazzard makes a grand return to the literary stage with The Great Fire, winner of the 2003 National Book Award. Its predecessor, The Transit of Venus, has become a modern classic, and this newest book—so exquisitely written—nearly convinces me that every novel should require 23 years of labor. This is a story of far reaches and big themes: desolation and love, despair and hope, war and peace. The unfolding plot, its slow pace and Hazzard’s precise, almost pained, word choice reflect a time far removed from our own: the late 1940s and the aftermath of an inevitable war after the war to end all wars. The story moves like a strange, sad picaresque, where all adventure has been exhausted, but the old heroes and heroines go through the motions of their now ordinary lives; they seem hushed, shell-shocked, loathe to make a sudden move: “Two years into peace and bored to death by it. Each must scratch around now for some kind of compromise and call it destiny.”
The novel opens in 1947 with its ineffable leading man, Aldred Leith, 32 (picture Gregory Peck) on a train; his final destination is the Japanese island of Kure, close to Hiroshima—provocatively close, but very little is made of the greatest fire of the 20th century. Leith has spent the past two years traveling through China documenting the cultural consequences of civil war (Hazzard herself worked for British Intelligence in 1947 doing the same). But once he meets Helen and Ben Driscoll, he’s lost forever to his old life. The Driscoll family could have stepped from one of Grimm’s fairy tales: beautiful children unscathed by beastly parents. The brigadier Driscoll is a conniving medical commandant with a tendency to tyrannize the weak, and his wife is equally reprehensible. Often described as “changelings,” Ben, 20, is a bright-eyed Keats-ian figure suffering from a fatal degenerative disease, and Helen, 17, is as lovely as her Grecian namesake and surely more intelligent. Together they seem to have read everything. When our dashing, reticent boarder, straight out of Chaucer (“the parfit, gentil knight”), opens the door to their little room, he lets in the real world.
And what of the real world? In The Great Fire we witness many deaths but none of them creates much of an emotional stir. Hazzard’s diamond-cut set pieces (several of the stories originally appeared in The New Yorker) hover just beyond the flesh-and-blood world. This novel doesn’t escape the lash of its own perfect style until Aldred and Helen confess their love, forbidden by the gulf of age. At first I had little patience for Hazzard’s high-minded dialogue, but the consistency and depth of her style won me over. Ironically, every element of craft and artifice is employed to the ends of verisimilitude—human experience both interior and exterior, documentary and poetry delivered as one. Her pressed-linen prose is not finicky or naïve. As she says, “The posh voice was always fair game, but then all speech is exposure.” The language of The Great Fire is restrained, but it must be to guide us, without melodrama, toward the illogical but still longed for conclusion—that love conquers all; that two people who have suffered much may “one day be alone and safe and beautiful.”