The Great Fire: A Novel [Hardcover]

Shirley Hazzard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 14, 2003

A Great Writer's Sweeping Story of Men and Women Struggling to Reclaim Their Lives in The Aftermath of World Conflict

The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard's first novel since The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is 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 the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction.

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

Hazzard is nothing if not discriminating. Hierarchies of feeling, perception, and taste abound in her writing, and this novel—her first in more than twenty years—takes on the very notion of what it means to be civilized. The fire of the title refers primarily to the atomic bombing of Japan, but also to the possibility of transcendent passion in its aftermath. In 1947, a thirty-two-year-old English war hero visiting Hiroshima during the occupation finds himself billeted in a compound overseen by a boorish Australian brigadier and his scheming wife. He is immediately enchanted, however, by the couple's children—a brilliant, sickly young man and his adoring sister—who prove to be prisoners in a different sort of conflict. In the ensuing love story, Hazzard's moral refinement occasionally veers toward preciosity, but such lapses are counterbalanced by her bracing conviction that we either build or destroy the world we want to live in with our every word and gesture.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Booklist

Despite this Australian writer's absence from the world's fiction stage--since the 1981 publication of The Transit of Venus, which earned her great acclaim, including the National Book Critics' Circle Award--her readers have continued to hold hands in devotion and anticipation. Their thrill over her new novel will be completed; the long days and nights of waiting will be forgotten. Time and place have always been exactly evoked in Hazzard's fiction, and such is the case here. The time is 1947-48, and the place is, primarily, East Asia. Obviously, then, this is a locale much altered--by the events of World War II, of course, and, as we see, physical destruction and psychological wariness and weariness lay over the land. Our hero, and indeed he fills the requirements to be called one, is Aldred Leith, who is English and part of the occupation forces in Japan; his particular military task is damage survey. He has an interesting past, including, most recently, a two-year walk across civil-war-torn China to write a book. In the present, which readers will feel they inhabit right along with Leith, by way of Hazzard's beautifully atmospheric prose, he meets the teenage daughter and younger son of a local Australian commander. And, as Helen is growing headlong into womanhood, this novel of war's aftermath becomes a story of love--or more to the point, of the restoration of the capacity for love once global and personal trauma have been shed. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (October 14, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374166447
• ISBN-13: 978-0374166441
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (98 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,048,808 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

72 of 78 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Labor of Love, from both author and reader - and worth it!, February 10, 2004

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Great Fire: A Novel (Hardcover)

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, repeatedly, to die from the great fires into which his times had pitched him, he had discovered a desire to live completely; by which he meant, with her."

No, this is not a novel for a quick read on a plane or to keep in the car for unexpected delays. This is a rare gem that deserves full attention. The rewards are inestimable. Think Virginia Woolf. Think Reliquary.

49 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The novel is even more poignant given Iraq, December 29, 2004

By 

Rockdoc "Rockdoc" (Somerset, KY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Great Fire: A Novel (Hardcover)

As an English teacher, I am depressed to read that an author's having access to a sophisticated vocabulary is a drawback. Yet Shirley Hazzard's novel is an old-fashioned book--despite her elliptical style--for though the book is slender, the characters are fully rendered, and the theme of the novel--the absurdity and necessity of having a personal life in light of the destructive forces of war and politics--comes through clean and clear. There is so much mean-spiritedness in some of the reviews that it is difficult to know what to address first. Ben and Helen are old beyond their ages, first, because they read deeply and widely; second, because of the coldness of their family which has made it necessary for them to turn inward to books and to each other; and, third, because Ben is dying (look up the age at which Keats was writing his wonderful poetry or a biography of Sylvia Plath). Apparently, too, not one of the negative reviewers has ever actually been in love. One suspects that they took resumes from prospective mates! This story is also particularly poignant as a reminder of the cost of war.

I think reviewers and critics often miss the role taste plays in our evaluations of books. What I would like to see, in reading as in life, is a touch more humility before discouraging someone else from reading a book. I can't imagine that everyone associated with the Book Critics Circle is illiterate, despite the accusations of some of Amazon's reviewers. I thought Hazard's novel a beautifully written, fully realized novel and was disappointed to come to the end of it. However, I must confess that often, I don't get Borges. Does that make those that find his work valuable wrong? Is my denseness Borges' fault or my own?

Unfortunately, many of the reviewers remind me of (a few of) my eighteen-year-old students--oh, the weight of so much critical accumen and the wonder of being an age at which everyone is "stupid" except, perhaps, oneself. I'm sorry some of the readers were disappointed. Perhaps they should stick with the classics, and thereby not have to feel diminished by reading (gasp!) a love story (despite the number of love stories in classical literature, it is some comfort to read what is already vetted) or with the quick reads that do not demand much of the reader. There is nothing wrong with either approach to reading, only with trashing what one has not taken the time to understand or perhaps does not have an affinity for.

70 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Subtle, Understated, Beautiful, Deadly!, November 8, 2003

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Great Fire: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.