Shirley Hazzard: The Great Fire

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Beginning in the Japanese spring of 1947, and ending around a year later in dreary Wellington (standing in for the end of the world), this is a story of people putting their lives back together after the conflagrations in Europe and the Pacific. It's essentially a romance: man meets woman, albeit a young one, and love follows a thwarted path in a disoriented world.

Yet Hazzard's familiarity with post-war international politics, particularly in the Asian region (at age 16 she was invited by British Intelligence to spy on China), her ethical preoccupations and her stupendously tight writing style has produced a tense, dazzling, morally questioning novel which has just won the United States National Book Award.

Aldred Leith — "32 years old. He did not consider himself young" — is a hero, an intellectual decorated with war medals. He's spent the past two years travelling through China, collecting evidence "of that astounding scene before it is recast — before it gathers planetary momentum and loses arcane fascination".

He arrives in Japan, to an island near Hiroshima, where he will collect evidence of the devastation wrought by that great fire. For Leith, whose preoccupations are loss and disruption "of continents, cultures and existences", the big question is how to live in this altered world. His answer, which comes suddenly upon him, and is presumably Hazzard's own, is love. This conclusion, in its romantic, grating simplicity, sits oddly with the extraordinary intellectualism of the rest of the text.

On that Japanese island Leith meets two young people, Ben and Helen, 20 and 17 respectively, the offspring of a brutish Australian administrator. They are, Leith concludes, "changelings", with minds that soar above their origins, and Leith feels he has found soulmates. He falls passionately in love with Helen, and she with him, although with typical heroism, resists his urges in deference to her youth. "You are 14 and I am 100," he tells her.

Thus, love is another great fire in which he finds himself. For all its great themes and preoccupations, this is above all a most old-fashioned style of romance. Helen's parents hate Leith — he is all they are not — and snatch Helen away to the bitter end of the world: where else, but Wellington.

(Note to locals: New Zealand, and the Antipodes in general, comes in for a real bollocking here, and those who are insecure or overly sensitive will be indignant. There's hardly a sentence that isn't directed towards a sneer. The people are passionless, attenuated. "Too cautious to detest, Mrs Baillie did, with some regularity, not quite like." The only decent conversation is to be had with fellow exiles.)

Leith in his turn must return to London, also charred, but where the conversation is unfailingly top-drawer. The plot's tension therefore derives from "will they, won't they" come together again, and one naturally expects that they won't.

This is not a book that you read unconsciously: the writing insists on itself — particular, meticulous sentences pared so that each comma is a peg fixing the taut membrane of its phrase.

Sometimes Hazzard over-reaches herself, producing dialogue that's a parody of conversation, so immersed in its own erudite, stylistic perfection that we're jolted out of fiction's reverie of credulousness. She seems to do this deliberately, playing with our relationships with her characters. Leith, for instance, is usually just that — "Leith" — and only occasionally "Aldred" but, every couple of chapters, he
suddenly, inexplicably recedes and becomes simply "the man".

The novel moves forward with chronological orderliness, although the past is revisited in conversation. Leith's wartime experiences are not made explicit, although the fleeting glimpses are horrific enough. Violence is sporadic — a suicide, a war crime, a spattering of guts — yet carefully significant, well chosen. Mostly, we read Leith's war in what he has become: a pacifist, he decides. "How, with the evidence before them, men can contemplate more war is incomprehensible and terrifying ... In man, the primitive prevails."

Hazzard works towards revealing the great truths, which is why things become a little symbolic and even simplistic at times. At pains to reveal the contradictions, the impossibility or mistakenness of black-and-white absolutism in the emerging world, she shows how both victors and vanquished struggle with helplessness, and shared guilt.

A promising secondary story (which drains away unsatisfactorily) involves Leith's friend Peter Exley, an Australian working in Hong Kong, investigating war crimes. He meets the eye of a jailed Japanese prisoner: "It was difficult to say, then, who was the accused."

"You look the man in the eye, then coolly kill him. You drop a bomb and
dissociate yourself from the consequences. Is it murder or is it war? Is war in any case murder?" These questions are at the heart of honest men's rehabilitation into a post-war world, and Hazzard bravely, unflinchingly considers them. Exley and his room-mate, for instance, "each, in the night, now fought alone the war that neither could survive".

I thought this a marvellously skilled piece of writing. Struck by William Boyd's Any Human Heart, a portrait of a man whose life, like the 20th century itself, was cut in half by the war, it's satisfying so soon to discover another novel unafraid to tackle these same themes, albeit with rather more
self-conscious treatment, and a too-simple solution.

Virago, $35