The Great Fire, a novel by Shirley Hazzard

The world of Hazzard's new novel, her first in 22 years, is poised between fire and ice. It is 1948, and the hot war is just ended, the war of incendiary bombs dropped on Europe and the two great bombs detonated over Japan; the cold war is just beginning, suggested by Hazzard by a minor character's expedition to the South Pole from a New Zealand base camp.

The core story of this sometimes vexing novel is that of Aldred Leith and Helen Driscoll, who each must lose another (Aldred's best friend, Helen's brother) that they may be together. Aldred has been monitoring political conditions in China, a job he shares with Hazzard, who did so for Britain in the 1940s.

The author's years in New Zealand also inform her description of this country, where geography seems to be destiny:

Remoteness had generated a fear of occasion, and the populace clung to the safety of its small concerns, just as their forebears had clung to these islands, greeting them as rafts and spars in the wild ocean, rather than as a destination. They had left their destination behind them, and could only re-create. here, its lesser emblems. Audacity had been exhausted in arriving at the uttermost point of earth. They wished above all to pretend that nothing had happened.

Shirley Hazzard is skilled at using dialogue to render consciousness, skipping from direct to indirect discourse, from text to subtext, sometimes all within the same paragraph. It is rare for her to use images from nature in this book, but when she chooses to, she can produce a fine poetic passage like the following. Aldred observes a pile of firewood, and remembers his childhood perceptions:

... shapes, textures, colours; the mottlings and dapplings. The scrubby bark, coruscated, or the smooth angular pieces like bones. Forms arched and grooved like a lobster, or humped like a whale. Dark joints, to which foliage adhered like bay leaves in a stew. Pinecones, and a frond of pine needles still flourishing on the hacked branch.

The historical and geographical sweep of the novel might be tempting to a film maker, but the story resists the translation. The book's strength is in its characters' psychology, which is closely observed, if never fully explained.

posted: 6:31:14 PM