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The Great Fire Paperback – July 1, 2004
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The Great Fire is the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction.
More than twenty years after the classic The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard returns to fiction with a novel that in the words of Ann Patchett "is brilliant and dazzling..."
The Great Fire is an extraordinary love story set in the immediate aftermath of the great conflagration of the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His counterpart, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself.
In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia's coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity. The Great Fire is a story of love in the aftermath of war by "purely and simply, one of the greatest writers working in English today." (Michael Cunningham)
- Print length326 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPicador
- Publication dateJuly 1, 2004
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.9 x 8.2 inches
- ISBN-100312423586
- ISBN-13978-0312423582
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Editorial Reviews
From The New Yorker
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
Review
“Beauty is felt in almost every line of this austerely gorgeous work.” ―Chicago Tribune
“So majestic in scope and so sophisticated in diction it evokes a rhapsodic gratitude in the reader...Calls to mind the writerly command of A.S. Byatt, Lawrence Durrell, Nadine Gordimer, and Graham Greene.” ―The San Diego Union-Tribune
“The last masterpiece of a vanished age of civility.” ―The Wall Street Journal
“[The Great Fire] sails into port like a magnificent ship of fiction from another era.” ―Entertainment Weekly
“The Great Fire is about both the destructive conflagrations of war and the restorative conflagrations of the heart. Hazzard's moving, generous story paints love as the greatest rescuer of all--as apt today in our troubling, troubled world as it was 55 years ago.” ―San Francisco Chronicle
“Hazzard writes with an extraordinary command of geography and time.... Flashes of violence cut through the contemplative narrative, but in her exquisitely cut sentences, hazzard concentrates on the subtler movements of these hearts cauterized by violence.” ― Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor
“A hypnotic novel that unfolds like a dream: Japan, Southeast Asia, the end of one war and the beginning of another, the colonial order gone, and at the center of it all, a love story.”―Joan Didion, author of Where I Was From
“Stunning . . . Shirley Hazzard has gifted us, in The Great Fire, a novel of indispensable happiness and sorrow. I loved this novel beyond dreams.”
―Howard Norman, The Washington Post Book World
“A classic romance . . . the greatest pleasure is [Hazzard’s] subtle and unexpected prose.”
―Regina Marler, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“What better gift . . . than a novel that confirms the value of the individual―the individual heart, mind, spirit―even amidst the obfuscating demands of history and politics and culture … . [The Great Fire] is a novel of incredible emotional wisdom, full of authentic characters, vivid places, and language that is both precise and beautiful.”
―Alice McDermott, Commonweal magazine
“The Great Fire . . . streaks through a reader’s ken in the manner of a comet.”
―Thomas Mallon, The Atlantic Monthly
“[Hazzard’s] prose remains one of the glories of English literature.”
―Charles Taylor, Newsday, “Our Favorite Books of 2003”
“The Great Fire is a perfect book, without a superfluous word . . . radiant.”
―Eve Claxton, Time Out (New York)
“The most interesting novel published this year . . . Exquisitely crafted … Every sentence hits its mark.”
―The Economist
“Brilliant and dazzling . . . A book that is worth a twenty-year wait.”
―Ann Patchett
“The Great Fire is a brilliant, brave, and sublimely written novel that allows the literate reader the consolation of having touched infinity. This wonderful book, which must be read at least twice simply to savor Hazzard’s sentences and set pieces, is among the most transcendent works I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.”
―Anita Shreve
“Purely and simply, one of the greatest writers working in English today.”
―Michael Cunningham
About the Author
Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) was born in Australia, and in early years traveled the world with her parents due to their diplomatic postings. At sixteen, living in Hong Kong, she was engaged by British Intelligence, where, in 1947-48, she was involved in monitoring the civil war in China. Thereafter, she lived in New Zealand and in Europe; in the United States, where she worked for the United Nations Secretariat in New York; and in Italy. In 1963, she married the writer Francis Steegmuller, who died in 1994.
Ms. Hazzard's novels are The Evening of the Holiday (1966), The Bay of Noon (1970), The Transit of Venus (1981) and The Great Fire (2003). She is also the author of two collections of short fiction, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). Her nonfiction works include Defeat of an Ideal (1973), Countenance of Truth (1990), and the memoir Greene on Capri (2000). She lived in New York, with sojourns in Italy.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Now they were starting. Finality ran through the train, an exhalation. There were thuds, hoots, whistles, and the shrieks of late arrivals. From a megaphone, announcements were incomprehensible in American and Japanese. Before the train had moved at all, the platform faces receded into the expression of those who remain.
Leith sat by a window, his body submissively chugging as they got under way. He would presently see that rain continued to fall on the charred suburbs of Tokyo, raising, even within the train, a spectral odour of cinders. Meanwhile, he was examining a photograph of his father. Aldred Leith was holding a book in his right hand--not reading, but looking at a likeness of his father on the back cover.
It was one of those pictures, the author at his desk. In an enactment of momentary interruption, the man was half-turned to the camera, left elbow on blotter, right hand splayed over knee. Features fine and lined, light eyes, one eyelid drooping. A taut mouth. Forehead full, full crop of longish white hair. The torso broad but spare; the clothes unaffected, old and good. As a boy, Leith had wondered how his father could always have good clothes so seldom renewed--a seeming impossibility, like having a perpetual two days' growth of beard.
The expression, not calm but contained, was unrevealing. Siding with the man, the furniture supplied few clues: a secretary of dark wood was fitted in its top section with pigeonholes and small closed drawers. This desk had been so much part of the climate of family life, indivisible from his father's moods--and even appearing, to the child, to generate them--that the son had never until now inspected it with adult eyes. For that measure of detachment, a global conflict had been required, a wartime absence, a voyage across the world, a long walk through Asia; a wet morning and strange train.
There was no telephone on the desk, no clock or calendar. A bowl of blown roses, implausibly prominent, had perhaps been borrowed, by the photographer, from another room. On the blotter, two handwritten pages were shielded by the tweedy sleeve. Pens and pencils fanned from a holder alongside new books whose titles, just legible, were those of Oliver Leith's novels in postwar translations. There were bills on a spike, a glass dish of chips, a paperweight in onyx. No imaginable colours, other than those of the foisted flowers; no object that invited, by its form or material, the pressure of a hand. No photograph. Nothing to suggest familiarity or attachment.
The adult son thought the picture loveless. The father who had famously written about love--love of self, of places, of women and men--was renowned for a private detachment. His life, and that of his wife, his child, was a tale of dislocation: there were novels of love from Manchuria to Madagascar. The book newly to hand, outcome of a grim postwar winter in Greece, could be no exception. And was called Parthenon Freeze.
If the man had stood up and walked from the picture, the strong torso would have been seen to dwindle into the stockiness of shortish legs. The son's greater height, not immoderate, came through his mother; his dark eyes also.
All this time, Leith's body had been gathering speed. Putting the book aside, he interested himself in the world at the window: wet town giving way to fields, fields soggily surrendering to landscape. The whole truncated from time to time by an abrupt tunnel or the lash of an incoming train. Body went on ahead; thought hung back. The body could give a good account of itself--so many cities, villages, countries; so many encounters, such privation and exertion should, in anyone's eyes, constitute achievement. Leith's father had himself flourished the trick of mobility, fretting himself into receptivity and fresh impression. The son was inclined to recall the platform farewells.
He had the shabby little compartment to himself. It was locked, and he had been given a key. It was clean, and the window had been washed. Other sections of the train were crammed with famished, thread bare Japanese. But the victors travelled at their ease, inviolable in their alien uniforms. Ahead and behind, the vanquished overflowed hard benches and soiled corridors: men, women, infants, in the miasma of endurance. In the steam of humanity and the stench from an appalling latrine. Deploring, Aldred Leith was nevertheless grateful for solitude, and spread his belongings on the opposite seat. Having looked awhile at Asia from his window, he brought out a different, heavier book from his canvas bag.
In that spring of 1947, Leith was thirty-two years old. He did not consider himself young. Like others of his generation, had perhaps never quite done so, being born into knowledge of the Great War. In the thoughtful child, as in the imaginative and travelled schoolboy, the desire had been for growth: to be up and away. From the university where he did well and made friends, he had strolled forth distinctive. Then came the forced march of resumed war. After that, there was no doubling back to recover one's youth or take up the slack. In the wake of so much death, the necessity to assemble life became both urgent and oppressive.
Where traceable, his paternal ancestors had been, while solidly professional, enlivened by oddity. His grandfather, derided by relatives as an impecunious dilettante, had spiked all guns by inventing, at an advanced age, a simple mechanical process that made his fortune. Aldred's father, starting out as a geologist whose youthful surveys in high places--Bhutan, the Caucasus--produced, first, lucid articles, had soon followed these with lucid harsh short stories. The subsequent novels, astringently romantic, brought him autonomy and fame. Renouncing geology, he had kept a finger, even so, on the pulse of that first profession, introducing it with authority here and there in his varied narratives: the Jurassic rocks of East Greenland, the lavatic strata of far islands; these played their parts in the plot. In Oliver Leith's house in Norfolk there hung a painting of the youthful geologist prowling the moraines on his shortish legs. A picture consequential yet inept, like a portrait by Benjamin Robert Haydon.
Leith's mother, by birth a Londoner, was of Scots descent. There were red-cheeked relatives, well connected. A fine tall stone house, freezing away near Inverness, had been a place of cousinly convergence in summers before the Second World War. Aldred had not been an only child: a younger sister had died in childhood from diphtheria. It was then that his mother had begun to accompany, or follow, her husband on his journeys, taking their son with her.
And on the move ever since, the son thought, looking from his window at the stricken coasts of Japan. Two years ago, as war was ending, he had intended to create for himself a fixed point, some centre from which departures might be made--the decision seeming, at the time, entirely his to make. Instead, at an immense distance from anything resembling home, he wondered with unconcern what circumstance would next transform the story.
From a habit of self-reliance, he was used to his own moods and did not mind an occasional touch of fatalism. He had, himself, some fame, quite unlike his father's and quite unsought.
It was near evening when he arrived. The train was very late, but an Australian soldier sent to meet him was waiting on the improvised platform: "Major Leith?"
"You had a long wait."
"That's all right." They went down ill-lit wooden stairs. A jeep was parked on gravel. "I had a book."
They swung the kit aboard, and climbed in. On an unrepaired road, where pedestrians wheeled bicycles in the dusk, they skirted large craters and dipped prudently into small ones. They were breathing dust and, through it, smells of the sea.
Leith asked, "What were you reading?"
The soldier groped with free hand to the floor. "My girl sent it."
The same photograph: Oliver Leith at his desk. On the front cover, the white tide, cobalt sky, and snowbound Acropolis.
Leith brought out his own copy from a trenchcoat pocket.
"I'll be damned."
They laughed, coming alive out of khaki drab. The driver was possibly twenty: staunch body, plain pleasant face. Grey eyes, wide apart, wide awake. "You related?"
"My father."
"I'm damned."
They were near the waterfront now, following the bed of some derelict subsidiary railway. The joltings might have smashed a rib cage. You could just see an arc of coastal shapes, far out from ruined docks: hills with rare lights and a black calligraphy of trees fringing the silhouettes of steep islands. The foreground reality, a wartime shambles of a harbour with its capsized shipping, was visible enough, and could, in that year, have been almost anywhere on earth.
The driver was peering along the track. "Write yourself?"
"Not in that way."
"Never too late."
The boy plainly considered his passenger past the stage of revelations. A dozen years apart in age, they were conclusively divided by war. The young soldier, called to arms as guns fell silent, was at peace with this superior--civil and comradely, scarcely saluting or saying Sir, formalities no longer justified. Intuitively, too, they shared the unease of conquerors: the unseemliness of finding themselves few miles from Hiroshima.
"How do you manage here?" The man had a deep, low voice. If one had to put a colour to it, it would have been dark blue; or what people in costly shops call burgundy.
Product details
- Publisher : Picador; First Edition (July 1, 2004)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 326 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0312423586
- ISBN-13 : 978-0312423582
- Item Weight : 11.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #354,738 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,767 in 20th Century Historical Fiction (Books)
- #3,314 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #18,444 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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We see Aldred through others' eyes, he is handsome, a wounded and reluctant hero who is travelling through Japan and China to write about it, though writing the book is somewhat secondary to the story. He seems to have grown up privileged, though not titled. His father is a famous author, but a distant and cold parent.
I loved the book and now I know why it stuck with me after reading it the first time. It's the kind of book, one could read again and again. But it is not for everyone; it is not an easy or fast read, or a summer beach read.The fact that Helen is only sixteen when they meet could be bothersome for some people, and the perspective on the Far East is very western. But I loved it and highly recommend it if you love language and post WWII fiction.
Set against the backdrop of post WW II occupation, Hazzard expresses so many emotions and feelings in one book, that it is truly exceptional. With a basic anti-war theme throughout, she creates a love story, a very unlikely love story, that is the central theme of the book. But within, she shows us, despair, sadness, mutilation, ennui, elation and imbecility, side by side with love, tenderness, sensitivity, human kindness and purity of heart, especially, as that purity meets the cruel, real world. The book takes a very long trip through an existential reality, yet shows how such reality can be controlled, at least partly, by our decisions and actions.
With stylistic brilliance, Hazzard creates metaphors that are truly magical, and even uses some hugely effective and informative epistilary style with mail, that is not instant, but takes weeks sometimes to travel halfway around the world. Yet in the face of all this turbulence, this destruction, this horror, what may prevail as the strongest thing, is true and pure love. While the concept is surely not new, the manner in which Ms. Hazzard expresses it surely is.
This book is suggested for any reader interested in some of the most profound and exquisite writing to be found. It has appeal to virtually every group of thinking readers. It is a book that speaks to the reader on many levels, but to all of the readers, it has a way of speaking to them personally.
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The plot was like a river crossing a plain, a bit sluggish and meandering, but it picks up momentum in the last third.
Spoiler alert: If you do not want clues about how the book ends, stop now.
The tone of the book is heavy with decline and exhaustion, a throwback to British writing in those post-war days. That, and knowing the back story, of how the relationship of Hazzard's that inspired this book fell apart after she and her lover returned to their homelands of England and Australia, I expected a sad ending for Aldred and Helen. Once they are separated, it was easy to expect that each would be captured and worn down by the conventions and obligations of their respective lives. As the end approached and Hazzard ran out of time for a real plot twist, I feared an insipid ending of love postponed, and implicitly denied. But, finally, with one last dash the lovers are re-united, to rise together above their respective Great Fires.
Helen's refusal to join her parents on the ship to America, where her beloved (by her, not the parents) invalid brother has died happens off-stage, which I think is a mistake. Up to that point the odious parents have assumed their control over Helen, and she has been obedient, so that is a significant turning point, a moment of drama and conflict, because at that point she has decisively thrown her lot in with Aldred, so it should have been written.
The ending is happy, and beautiful as it is, but slightly disorderly. Peter Exley is a loose end -- how fully does he recover, physically or mentally? Does he marry either of the women looking after him? Peter does not appear directly after his suicide attempt, which itself is a little unexplained since when last seen he had been told he should make a good recovery from the polio.
There is also a loose end of Helen's parents. As beautiful as the ending is, I was still left wishing for a denoument with the odious Driscolls. Perhaps the scene when Helen leaves the boat was it; all the more reason to include it. I imagine an alternative ending in which Helen DOES sail for California, Aldred rushes to meet her there -- if by air, easily arriving first, to prepare the battlefield with his friendly rival Tad, and a final denouement with all -- the parents, Helen, Aldred, Tad, coming together for a last battle in the presence of the dead Ben, who was beloved of Helen, Aldred, and Tad, but not his parents.
Hazzard also assumes away the choice Helen makes, to put the living ahead of the dead, by remaining in New Zealand to wait for Aldred instead of going to California for a final farewell to her brother -- a defensible choice, but also a significant one, considering her love for her brother and how he was spirited away without a goodbye from her.
A book to read, and then re-read.