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 

A Year of Reading - 2013

This year I thought that would have read much more considering I had three months off work on long service leave, but that didn’t quite happen. Reading is so tied with work for me that I think I wanted a break from it during my time off. I only read two books during those three months. Mind you one of them was the brilliant Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, which is challenging to say the least. 

Looking back over the year my pick for the best book would have to be Infinite Jest. Its complexity, intensity and uniqueness made for a fulfilling reading experience. An honorable mention has to go Patrick White’s The Tree of Man, which is just superbly written. I would also place The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard in the same exalted company. It was well appreciated amongst my book-club members as well.

As for the worst book of year? Well that would have to go to Alison Moore’s The Light House. It was certainly flawed, although I will not go on about it again, just read my review if you are interested! Richard Ford’s Canada was also very disappointing unfortunately.

I’m looking forward to next year’s reading. I have so many books piled up waiting to be read, but they are patient (can’t be hard, they just lay around), so why can’t I be? I do want to start reading more non-fiction again, so that will be my main aim throughout 2014.

If anyone wants to share their best and worst for the year then please go ahead, otherwise just keep reading!

The Transit of Venus – Shirley Hazzard (1980)

Rating: Sublime

Shirley Hazzard is one of those writers who can skirt the borders of literary pretension and get away with it due to her beautiful writing style and her subtle skill with narrative form. Hazzard also has a splendid way of making an obtuse plot inviting, making The Transit of Venus a master class of highly literate writing that even those who feel most comfortable with so called genre novels can easily read and enjoy. Hazzard is an Australian ex-pat who left the country in 1947 at the age of sixteen and as far as I can ascertain has never returned. She began the life of a writer in the early 1960’s when she submitted a short story that she’d written for her own enjoyment to The New Yorker and it was published. Since then there has been short story collections, non-fiction and four novels. Although Hazzard is not prolific, there was a gap of twenty-three years between The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire (2003); she makes up for it with her sheer class.

The Transit of Venus is, on the surface, a story about two orphaned Australian sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, who end up living in 1950’s England. The narrative takes place over four decades and follows their lives and, most significantly, their relationships. Love, with all its triumphs and tragedies, is central to the novel. Caroline has many suitors but it is her unrequited relationship with the long-suffering Astronomer Edmund Tice that gives the novel romantic tension. Using the actual transit of Venus as an analogy for the vagaries of romance, Hazzard milks it for all it’s worth. She suggests that like trying to observe the transit of Venus, you need to be in the right place at the right time to succeed romantically.

Thematically The Transit of Venus tackles not just the nature of love, but also gender politics, class, wartime morality and personal duplicity. One of the strengths of the novel is Hazzard’s skill in bringing the time period of the 1950’s to the 1980’s alive. The narrative is a superb blend of the personal and the historical, each complimenting the other. There’s a great sequence in which she describes a multitude of women across 1950’s London waking up and preparing them-selves for a day’s work. These women represent the vanguard of working women who weren’t going to waste the gender gains of WWII.

Hazzard’s pose is dazzling, sophisticated and beautiful, allowing a special kind of engagement between the reader and the narrative to develop. At times I felt enraptured by her writing and as the novel unfolded the strength and subtlety of the plot became readily apparent. Hazzard also drops a few strong hints about how the novel ends early on and if you pay attention you will understand the ending, otherwise you may be in for a re-read.

Hazzard’s characters have a certain cold complexity, particularly Caroline, who manoeuvres through her relationships with a subtle cold detachment. Caroline’s sister, Grace, mostly serves to underline the gender trap of domesticity, although she does take the lead in a section filled with frustrated romantic yearnings. Her husband, Christian Thrale, represents middle-class public servant small-mindedness, something Hazzard herself was familiar with having worked for the United Nations.

I first read this novel way back in 1994 for a university unit on Australian literature and it really opened my eyes to the possibilities of highly literate fiction. My prior reading habits mainly included cult novels and science fiction. Hazzard, with one novel, inspired me to move outside my comfort zone and for that I’m grateful. Recently I read an interview with Hazzard in the Guardian from 2006 and I realised that my conversion was no coincidence. She has this to say about literature:

"The idea that somebody has expressed something, in a supreme way, that it can be expressed; this is, I think, an enormous feature of literature. I feel that people are more unhappy, in an unrealised way, for not having these things in their lives: not being able to express something, or to profit from somebody else having expressed it. It can be anything but it's always, if it's supreme, an exaltation."

To me this perfectly sums up just why fiction is just as important, if not more so, than non-fiction when it comes to guiding us through this weird universe we find ourselves in. Read The Transit of Venus and you’ll find out just why.