The Great Fire

No, this is not the Da Vinci Code. Or John Grisham's The Firm. But here's the good news: I enjoyed both the Da Vinci Code and The Firm, and I loved The Great Fire. You don't need to be a snob to enjoy this book. It's a great story with great characters. But you're more likely to enjoy it if you really love writing (not just a good story, but also how language is used to get the story across). It is true that you will be challenged at times. When I started reading the book, I had the feeling that I didn't really know what was going on or who was who--Hazzard's style is not very linear. But in time everything starts making perfect sense, and you can't help being fascinated by the extraordinary command of the English prose that Hazzard has. With one sentence she can convey a place, a time, a feeling, an emotion in a way that you'll think you're there and it's happening to you. I believe she's one of the most talented writers I have ever encountered, and I've read a lot. I recommend this book to anyone who truly loves both great fiction and the English language.

One expected the long awaited novel from Shirley Hazzard to meet with adulation. Hazzard enjoys the reputation of writing award winning books over a considerable period of time. She also is her own person and defies classification as a novelist, so unique is her style. THE GREAT FIRE was twenty years in the writing and reading it reveals why that is so. Hazzard writes with thick, pungent, fragmented prose. Her manner is one of revealing bits and pieces of a story in non-linear fashion: at times within one page she has covered several decades of reference without even a demarcation of a paragraph or inserted space. This technique demands total concentration from the reader and at least with this reader requires retrograde reading, reviewing previous paragraphs and sentences to assure that the story is intact!And of course it is. Any time spent re-reading Hazzard's luminous prose is time twice blessed. Few other authors can bathe in phrases so articulate and wise that not only are they descriptive and additive, but they also can be read as isolated poems. "Our pleasures. He and I have killed, hand to hand, and have absorbed it. Can recall it, incredulous. Our pleasures were never taken that way, as by some in battle. Once, after a skirmish in the desert, a fellow officer whom he had never considered vicious had remarked. 'A man who hasn't killed is incomplete, analogous to a woman who has never given birth.' Embracing the primitive; even gratified."The story: "The Great Fire" references the global devastation of WW II with particular empahsis on the nuclear attack on Japan. The year is 1947 and the characters are two men forever bonded by their experiences in battle. One is writing a book on the effects of the war on Asia and the other is trying Japanese war criminals. The lives tie and untie in the most fascinating ways. There is a family spilt asunder by the times - a brother and sister cling together, he with a degenerative nerve disease, she with the commitment to caring for him. There is a love story; no, there are love stories, and each fragment of story unveils the damage inflicted upon bodies and souls by a War without equal. Hazzard captures the post-war fallout that has become all too familiar in the past century as well as the present one. And it is this weaving together of disparate souls in a tapestry of fire and smoke and eventual vacuum that is the driving force of this novel. Romance has never been written so bittersweet. "As she walked, she put her hand to her mouth to hold his kiss, and to her breast to enclose his touch. The man, instead went to his own room and to his table - to those papers where the ruined continents and cultures and existences that had consumed his mind and his body for years had given place to her story and his. He could not consider this a reduction - the one theme having embroiled the century and the world, and the other recasting his single fleeting miraculous life. Having expected, rep

My words are inadequate to describe this book. To paraphrase Ms. Hazzard when she lets one character describe another's beauty by saying "no one has a right to look like that," I say that no one has a right to write like this. Her prose is graceful, concise and descriptive. I was hooked by page 7 with this description: "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." Ms. Hazzard is able to say so much about the world in such few words. For example, a bridegoom is described as "pinstriped and trembling." On the brevity of life, a character says "'We are told that possessions are ephemeral, yet my God how they outlast us. . .'" There are succinct observations about women: "Balked of love, women will turn to religion, to nursing, to pets and plants, to things inanimate." And a woman taking a typing course is described as getting a life sentence. (A former woman colleague of mine said she always avoided taking typing so that she would never get a dead-end job.) One character says that there is no greater lottery than marriage. Is there a better way on earth to describe the risks involved in a marriage than that I ask. The main characters are good, decent people: Leigh, having been wounded and now returning from the Great War, is a model of decorum in his love for Helen, a young woman sixteen years his junior. She is the life line for her mortally ill brother Benedict. Peter Exley, friend of Leigh, risks everything to save a dying child of another race. You care about these people deeply. Ms. Hazzard's themes certainly meet Matthew Arnold's requirement of high seriousness-- the awfulness of war, the power of love. All we have to do to experience the timeliness of this novel is to watch or read the news. I put aside this great read briefly last evening to see the interview on the Bill Moyers program on the local public television station of a young wounded soldier forever maimed who had recently returned to the U. S. from fighting in Afghanistan. I suspect this young man would agree with Leigh who says the following about war: "Having had one go at setting the world right, I decline a second opportunity." This book was nominatead for the National Book Award; it's certainly worthy of such an honor.

The time frame for this historical novel is 1947-48, taking place primarily in East Asia, soon after the end of World War II. Ms Hazzard paints a panorama of a world ravaged by war through her flowing prose and with great descriptive clarity. At the heart of the story is Aldred Leith, who is an English officer, and has come to chart the physical damage incurred throughout the war, particularly Hiroshima. He finds not only this but great psychological damage to the prideful Japanese people. In time he falls in love with a young girl living in occupied Japan who is caring for her physically disabled brother. Using parallel narratives, we meet Aldred's Australian friend Peter Exley who is investigating Japanese war crimes in Hong Kong. Exley is facing a life changing decision, deciding what to do with the rest of his life.I was emotionally drawn into this novel and couldn't put it down. Many of the feelings of sadness and turmoil by rescuers and heros can be applied to our current situation in Iraq. A quote from the book sums it up as "the Chinese maxim whereby one becomes responsible for the life one saves". I would highly recommend this book.