Hazzard's 'Fire' burns brightly

By Valerie Ryan
Special to The Seattle Times

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While Shirley Hazzard can hardly be called prolific, her novels and the memoir about her friend and neighbor Graham Greene, "Greene on Capri," will surely secure for her a place of honor in the literary pantheon.

Arguably, her best novel is "The Transit of Venus," a modern classic that won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. For 22 years, readers who found that book irresistible have waited for another novel by Hazzard. At last, we have it, and "The Great Fire" is every bit as compelling as "Transit."

In those years between books, Hazzard has held on to and enlarged her "Transit" theme: love in the aftermath of war. The years have only deepened her insight and her laser-beam style of delineating character and events.

"Aldred Leith had developed stoicism that might have been a temporary condition of his war, of his task and travels. He knew, however, that the capacity for affection must be kept current if it is not to diminish into postcards." Much of the book is concerned with the "the capacity for affection," — finding it and holding on to it.

"The Great Fire" by Shirley Hazzard Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24

The "Great Fire" of the title is World War II. The pain, disruption and loss caused by such a conflagration as a war is explored in the lives of Hazzard's characters: Aldred Leith and, to a lesser extent, Peter Exley. They have survived: changed, wary, solitary. Both men are making tentative steps toward a future as yet unimagined.

Their lives play out in different ways. They met in Cairo in 1942, while billeted in a rundown hotel. Both were reading the same book, always a good beginning for a friendship. The time of the novel is 1947-48 and the intervening years have been nothing if not eventful.

Leith is the son of a famous novelist and a war hero who has come to postwar Japan to write a book about the effects of war on an ancient culture, one that had been insulated from incursions from outside. He has just completed a two-year walk around China, gathering information, and is now ensconced above the city of Kure, observing conditions in Japan.

He is the guest of the Driscolls, a truly horrific couple, who provide an absurd and noxious contrast to the gentlemanly Aldred. They are the parents of Ben, a terminally ill young boy, and his devoted sister, 17-year-old Helen. The children are bookish young people, surrounded by 19th-century novels, limited by Ben's illness — which is at once an embarrassment and an inconvenience to his parents.

Ben and Helen are delighted by the presence of Aldred, and all three understand instantly that this will be an important relationship. In the midst of a literary conversation, "Benedict understood that his sister had for the moment left him to be with this man. Soon, or at last, their own long pairing would be sundered: but not just today."

Leith must travel to China and then to Hong Kong to visit his friend Peter. In a letter to Helen he says, "The arrival this morning was unnerving, coinciding with the cruel crash of a local plane. We both, Peter and I, feel pursued by evocations of wartime violence, unexorcised ... When I think of what has recently been, I'm incredulous that the world is preparing for more war."

Longing to become an art historian, unable to stand up to his parents and refusing to go into law, Peter interrogates Japanese war criminals in Hong Kong. When, without reflection, he performs an act of simple compassion, the results are devastating, changing his life forever.

How to make a life in an uncertain, quixotic and dangerous world? Hazzard knows that world well: its geography, both interior and exterior. "The Great Fire" is a masterful rendering of the hopes and terrors experienced by those annealed in the fire.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company