IN peacetime, the personal looms to the foreground, and history recedes; in wartime, the personal either constitutes history, or is subsumed by it. Thus the literary romance may be especially suited to aftermath.
Aptly then, Shirley Hazzard's “The Great Fire” begins in occupied Japan in 1947. Her protagonist, Aldred Leith, a decorated British major, has been sent by the army to report on the condition of Hiroshima. When pressed by his minder to explain the strategy behind dropping the atomic bomb, Leith submits: “By then, neither side was interested in sparing anyone, even themselves.”
Early in his posting in the nearby town of Kure, Leith is captivated by the precocious daughter of a widely disliked brigadier. Helen is 17, Leith in his early thirties, and her parents strenuously oppose his courtship. Helen's beloved older brother is dying of a rare disorder, and her unpleasant parents have dumped the boy's daily care entirely on their daughter. At length, her parents wrench Helen from her would-be lover and her brother both, shipping their son to California to die alone, and whisking Helen to New Zealand, a world away from her mature admirer.
As sweetly as Ms Hazzard evokes the thwarted romance, it is hard for her backdrop not to steal the show. The time is marked by unease. Peace is nominal. The civil war is roiling in China. A confrontation between America and the Soviet Union threatens yet a third world war that these exhausted characters haven't the energy to contemplate. The conquerors in Japan are tainted by guilt over the bomb and by contempt for their charges. In passing, Helen's mother despairs from on high of “their awful gardens”. The gardens would not be all that this shrew notices.
Indeed, it is the survivors' struggle to triumph over backdrop—to force the personal to the fore again, and history aft—that constitutes Ms Hazzard's subject matter: “Having expected, repeatedly, to die from the great fires into which his times had pitched him, [Leith] had recovered a great desire to live completely; by which he meant, with her.” Love's redemption may be an age-old theme, but it is no mean feat to recover one's concern for simple individual happiness after so much collective suffering.
For a novel 20 years in the writing—Ms Hazzard's last, “The Transit of Venus”, won the National Book Critics' Circle Award in 1981—“The Great Fire” has a surprising quietness. Yet this is the hush you hear after a shoe has dropped, and not the misleading tranquillity that precedes disaster. There is a ring in the air. Moreover, the novel's pervasive sense of composure proceeds from its sentences, which are meticulous and thankfully free of creative-writing-school overload. Many are the books noisy with chatter and frou-frou, as writers take wild scatter-shots at their subjects in the hope that a few lines will hit the target. Ms Hazzard's prose is restful in its exactitude; every sentence strikes its mark.
If her text is never ostentatious, Ms Hazzard has a knack for deft, unexpected word choice. Leith dreads the arrival in Helen of “a charmless good sense”, or in Japan “the chronic anticlimax of nightfall”. A military minion is “hysterical with importance”.
Her descriptive powers are as muscular when depicting characters as they are with this uniquely shell-shocked era. Of an elderly woman: “Beauty, long since drained of erotic appeal, had remained a habit.” Of a couple: “The shared error of their marriage had grown to be a bond.”
Hewing to a classical tradition, Ms Hazzard's dialogue is more articulate than strict realism would dictate. Yet to put so much wisdom into the mouths of her characters constitutes a form of authorial generosity. Remarks a woman in London, “You'll find they keep saying, ‘Britain is finished'—and with such complacency, as if it were a solution.” Or Leith will opine, “Things, Helen, the sad silly evidence of things. We're told that possessions are ephemeral, yet my God how they outlast us—the clock on the bedside table, the cough drops, the diary with appointments for that very day.”
Though sporting an unusually large cast, “The Great Fire” never feels crowded. While hopscotching between Japan, Hong Kong, Britain and New Zealand, the novel maintains a remarkable sense of geographical unity—as if, after a world war of such dimension, anywhere on the planet begins to feel, depressingly, like the same place. Given the richness of these several settings and the nuanced nature of these many characters, lesser authors might have been tempted to write a doorstop. If nothing else, perhaps Ms Hazzard deserves America's National Book Award, for which “The Great Fire” has recently been short-listed, for achieving the effect of one of those pretentious, capital-B big books in fewer than 300 humble, exquisitely crafted pages.