The Great Fire - Shirley Hazzard (2003)

 

Rating: Excellent

Shirley Hazzard’s great achievement, The Transit of Venus (1980), is one of my all-time favourite novels and counts as one of the few books I’ve awarded a sublime rating to on this blog. The Great Fire became Hazzard’s last published novel some twenty-three years later and won the Miles Franklin Award. Set in the aftermath of WWII, The Great Fire explores the lives of a handful of protagonists who are finding their way in a world recovering from the catastrophe of war and its impact on them as individuals. Major Aldred Leith, a decorated and injured (but recovered) war veteran with a complicated back-story is in Japan, writing a book on the war’s aftermath, where he is billeted with an Australian family that includes a brother and sister, Benedict and Helen. While Benedict is terminally ill with a wasting disease, Helen shines as his loving sister and becomes connected to Leith by a deep mutual love. Of course, the world Hazzard vividly evokes with her splendid prose is both tragic and nebulous, proving to be an unfavourable environment for such love to blossom. The Great Fire finds its protagonists in a period of abeyance as they try and find their way toward peacetime lives. Leith’s wartime friend, Peter Exley, is investigating Axis war crimes and their lives intertwine for a time before post-war circumstances take them in different directions. Although the novel is essentially a post-war narrative, it is chiefly preoccupied with the characters personal lives, rather than military, political or historical machinations.

Shirley Hazzard, never to be repeated

As with The Transit of Venus, Hazzard’s thematic thrust involves love in the face of everything that can thwart its chances. Leith and Helen’s love is plagued by both tragic and practical barriers, no less Helen’s eventual journey away from Leith to Australia and then New Zealand, the literal end of the earth from Europe. The novel also explores the notion, without spelling it out, that despite the horrors of war and its disfiguring effects on the human soul, humanity can still display the redeeming characteristics of civilisation: literature, art, empathy, intelligence and most of all, love. Hazzard’s prose is exquisitely beautiful and mannered, bordering on the pretentious, featuring occasional grammatical rule bending, with capital letters in the wrong places and sudden jumps in setting. More accurately, Hazzard’s prose style comes across as an analogue of William Morris’s gorgeous textile designs from the nineteenth century; ornate and intricate, with splendid flourishes of colour.  Although I didn’t quite enjoy The Great Fire as much as The Transit of Venus, it is a wonderful jewel-like novel that requires concentration and care to fully absorb. They literally don’t write novels like this anymore; Hazzard, already ten years gone, can be remembered as a great Australian writer from another age, never to be repeated.

William Morris provides a visual representation