Customer Reviews

The Great Fire: A Novel

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(17)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Shirley Hazzard's A GREAT FIRE is undoubtedly a literary accomplishment, but not the sort that inflames people's imaginations or reveals great truths. Rather, in the twenty-two years since her publication of THE TRANSIT OF VENUS in 1981, it seems as if Ms. Hazzard has traveled backward at least those same twenty-two years, to 1959 or earlier. Her distance from her own characters and the coldness of her writing style are reminiscent of times long since past. Sadly, we have here Faulkner without the sense of atmosphere or place, Hardy without the intensity of feeling, Dickens without the sense of social purpose, Cormac McCarthy without the vernacular, and Marquez without the imagination.

Ms. Hazzard writes about the immediate aftermath of World War II, a world of ruin and survivorship and desperate returns to normalcy in spite of deep loss and physical and psychic scars. The story takes place largely in China and Japan, partially in Hong Kong and Australia, and partially in Italy and England. Yet despite the potential to evoke intense feeling about these places, the author gives us almost no sense of place, little sense of loss, and virtually no sense of the ruin inflicted on the native peoples of those countries. Japan and China feel no different than Cincinnati in this book, unless one allows for a scantly-portrayed ritual suicide early in the story.

I began this book with great expectations. A post-war Japanese setting, particularly involving Nagasaki and Hiroshima, offered enormous potential for exploring the psyche of the conquering Western forces upon viewing the devastation wreaked by their own weaponry. In THE GREAT FIRE, however, the after-effects of the war are virtually invisible, as if they never happened. We see none of the Japanese or Chinese citizen-survivors, only the stiff-upper-lipped British and Australians and a couple of crudely-drawn Americans. The effect is haughtily and unabashedly Eurocentric, as if the tortured soul of a thirtyish Brit for the love of a teenager carries more relevance than the suffering innocent civilians of Nanjing or Hiroshima whom we never even glimpse.

Perhaps Ms. Hazzard's intention was to criticize implicitly the Westerners' self-distancing from the horrors they inflicted at Hiroshima. If such were the case, then the main characters must engage the readers instead. Instead, we have a main character with all the warmth and personality of Alan Greenspan, a 17-year-old Lolita with a preternaturally mature (and mortally ill) younger brother, and an assortment of horrid parental role models lifted from Dr. Phil. THE GREAT FIRE is populated throughout with stereotypes and characters so artificially drawn, so lacking in warmth and feeling, that it is hard to care whether they live or die, whether they resolve their lots or suffer. Two major characters die sadly and unfairly in this book, but I found myself utterly unmoved, hardly caring for their fate. Even their dialog is cold and unrealistic. I found myself completely disbelieving that anyone has talked in this style since 1900.

Beyond the stiffness of Ms. Hazzard's character portrayals and dialog, I must also mention her writing. Good novelists write good prose to evoke feeling, but also to enhance their story. As I read THE GREAT FIRE, I could imagine Ms. Hazzard at her writing desk, sitting back every five or ten minutes to admire her own cleverness. Unfortunately, much of her writing is too clever by half, as if her wordsmithing mattered far to her than the story line. Examples of such stilted and meaningless phraseology abound; here are a few brief examples from dozens I noted.

"Charlotte's carroty curls were bound with colored ribbons. Her pretty frocks were smocked over her diminutive chest."

"The hill above the tiny town was gravid in the way of that landscape, its grassy garment stretched like soft cloth over an imagined anatomy of ancient, unremembered walls, graves, and ditches; a tumid rise, over which you might mentally pass your hand."

"He was aware of some consequential element that he had not identified. And with indifference realised it was beauty."

"Good fortune is a prodigy whose occasion one must rise to."

"In the angle of a corridor, against a distempered wall, there was a hard bench that made a trio with two steel chairs."

Readers who enjoy writing for its own cleverness, or who want to read a serious writer regardless whether there is a story to engage them or a point to be had, will find THE GREAT FIRE worthwhile for its 278 pages' worth of turns of phrase. Most readers, I fear, will be put off by the pacing and by the unbelievability of the characters. For me, this was a book with far too much smoke to make a 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.

This is an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful novel. The theme is the effort to recapture life after the chaos and destruction of WWII. The answer appears to be love, particularly a sort of very romanticized, relatively selfless form of romantic love. The primary character is a British writer in love with a teenage girl. His character is contrasted with a friend who is also searching for some authenticity in his life. The theme is certainly worthwhile.
Unfortunately, while Hazzard is certainly a skillful writer, her skills are deployed in a way that makes this book unattractive. Her highly allusive prose has a generally flat quality and becomes monotonous despite her attempts to engage a variety of characters and situations. Her characters and not particularly engaging, a major defect in a novel with a large psychological component.

The Great Fire is a romance novel whose classic and somewhat predictable plot line is adorned and partially disguised by Shirley Hazzard's skillful writing style and the unfamiliarity of her exotic settings. The protagonist, Leith, is an independent, somewhat lonely figure. The lack of connection between Leith and his family and the nomadic nature of his life give him a strange quality of detachment. While he is knowledgeable about his surroundings, Leith seems to experience them as a remote observer, and to avoid becoming involved with the people he meets. After years in World War II and extensive travels through China, Leith appears wise and takes an air of mild resignation towards many of the activities of his daily life. Leith reads as a cinematic hero who allows his steady, rugged demeanor to soften for only a very few people.

The novel moves methodically. Hazzard bypasses climatic moments, and, instead, allows the book's excitement to spring from the sheer naturalness of its pace. She presents events in a lifelike way. Everything takes time. It takes time for Leith to receive letters from his darling love, Helen, and it takes time for him to get from China to Japan to London and eventually to New Zealand. Hazzard's ability to give a sense of the heavy, prolonged passage of time drew me in. As I read, I, like the characters, felt as if I were waiting an eternity for a single moment of passion, a consummation of Leith and Helen's semi-stifled love. The obstacles in The Great Fire play the role of the antagonist. The principal obstacle is simply the condition of humans both as victims of time and age and as slaves of society's expectations. Time and the objections of Helen's charmless, inhuman parents move like a sluggish juggernaut encroaching upon Leith and Helen.

The third-person narrator is virtually omniscient. At first, it is as though the narrator views the characters and story through the eyes of Leith. Later, however, you abruptly find yourself seeing relationships from the perspective of Leith's friends or even, in some cases, of mere acquaintances. In several sections the narrator seems to live with Leith's best friend, with whom the protagonist spends some time during the story and for whom he feels a paternal loyalty. Hazzard's method is unexpected, but her detours from the principal story line create a stronger sense of the exotic and precarious postwar setting.

The events of The Great Fire, when stripped to their essence, are fairly formulaic. Leith falls in love with a too-young woman, expected impediments arise from this situation, and then, slowly, like falling chess pieces, they move aside in the novel's final scenes. While Hazzard uses a very realistic pace, the sphere and daily existence that she illustrates seems permeated with a poetic otherworldliness. I found Hazzard's word choices sometimes jarring, as if her knowledge of the English language were perhaps tentative or confused. Here is her take on the Pearl River at Canton:

"...one might imagine that it had completed its course, so strong was the sense of estuary. On that illusory harbour, suburbs of sampans, aligned, rose and fell with the river -- as if, swarming ashore, they had mingled with the dun habitations on dry land. Refugees from the civil war had created teetering settlements even on the groups of logs floated together at the docks of timber yards. The city appeared to sway on its own silt. At its periphery, the disintegrating shrines and statuary, each in isolation, rose up out of sediment damply packed or, in summer, hard-baked. And always, on some rise, the Chinese tombs usurped the soil." (120)

Eventually I grew accustomed to her diction and found that while she does not always use words in expected ways, she most certainly is not mistaken as to their meaning. Instead she chooses words that suggest sometimes inexpressible qualities in the air or atmosphere of a scene, moment, feeling or setting. The remoteness of her descriptions and the strangeness of her prose engage and challenge the reader.

If it weren't for the distinctive seriousness and grace of Hazzard's manner of writing, one might dismiss The Great Fire as a seductively romantic potboiler. The novel's unrealistically larger-than-life brand of love, however, gets an edge from Hazzard's fully imagined environment and her esoteric style.

It is rare that I have a hard time getting past the basic premise of a novel. I read a lot of fantasy, so suspension of disbelief is never a problem. The Lovely Bones is one of my recent favorites, so I can accept a dead narrator. I didn't care for but finished American Pyscho, so my main characters don't have to be particularly likable so long as they're interesting. But I have to say up front that I just could never get around the fact that the center of passion in this book lay in a burgeoning relationship between the thirty-some old main character Aldred Leith and a seventeen-year-old girl, one who has been helpmate for years to her dying brother and so has never really had a chance to experience the social world. It just never went down easily for me and so colored my reactions to the novel (though there are other reasons as well for the low ranking).
Rather than feel sympathy for the obstacles thrown up to the relationship, I felt myself becoming more and more disturbed by this man's desire for the young girl, the feeling compounded when Hazzard adds a "competitor" for the girl's affections--an American soldier who seems to see little odd or unseemly about their rivalry. The same, to me, mystifying lack of concern plays out among all of the main character's, none of whom seem to have harbored a single moment's worth of misgiving over whether this pursuit was in the girl's best interest and many of whom in fact do their best to help Leith.
The only characters who are given any space at all to criticize his desire are the girl's parents, who are first off mere caricatures of the "new type" of ruling power (materialistic, ambitious, anti-intellectual, non-cultured) and who secondly never get to directly voice the (seemingly) reasonable objections they might have about their under-18 daughter going off with a man twice her age whom she has only known a short while and with whom they themselves have had almost no contact. Instead, we are given their reactions through Leith's not particularly objective assumptions and imaginings about their response.
Beyond my problems with this singular plot point, there were other reasons I did not take much of a shine to the book. The characterization I thought was wide-ranging in the quality of its portrayals, running the spectrum from some beautifully brief yet fully revealing moments with regard to some of the most minor characters to the aforementioned gross caricaturization of the girl's parents. The girl herself, along with her brother, I never found all that believable or all that tangible. Their speech and behaviors never once felt like a true depiction of even unusually intelligent or sensitive teens in the mid-1940's. While the portrayal of the main character was strong, the secondary focus, Peter Exley, paled in comparison, as did his general storyline. As for many of the other characters, they seem stilted in their speech and, like the siblings, not very human. The stilted dialogue, along with the romance, the distance, the sense of hierarchy that permeates a lot of the novel all made it seem that these were people moving through a world of the 1800's rather than a century later.
One of the major questions of the novel is how do people who have come through the Great Fire of the war put their lives back together. The characters themselves struggle with this as well as with the seeming way their experiences have forced them into solo flight paths. Hazzard does an excellent job of expressing the distance these characters feel from the people in their lives as well as from their former and even current selves, but the price paid is that the reader is also distanced from these characters. To make me feel for their rejuvenation attempts, I needed more than the stock cold father who dies before the relationship with the son is examined or shored up, the introduction of sudden physical tragedy, or a romance that was just off-putting.
The settings are perfect matches for the larger themes, post-war Japan and Hong Kong, but they are so minimally sketched except for the opening section on Leith's temporary home (a truly beautiful apt setting and description), that one often feels the book could be taking place almost anywhere. In fact, when the setting does intrude itself forcefully into the book, it feels forced and somewhat unearned.
Stylistically, there are certainly gorgeous sentences peppered throughout much of the book, but not to any strong effect other than to sometimes marvel at the language itself rather than at what it evokes. And there were a distracting number of times where I had the sense that the author was all too present in the "writerly" mode of coming up with that brilliantly strange simile or metaphor that sounds great but is just too fuzzy to mean much or that pulls the reader out while they puzzle over just what is meant.
Is there anything to like in the novel? Well, as mentioned, some of the writing is certainly to be admired for its beauty. There are several minor characters who are lovingly detailed (though so minor as to be too brief to be of much worth in the whole). The shift from war as the Great Fire to love is wonderful and her sections on love make for great excerpts, as do a few other set scenes involving some of those minor characters described above. But these moments of pure writing talent in the end only emphasize the overall weakness of the book.

Up until about the first 80 pages, I thought that I was really going to like this novel. I certainly appreciated Hazzard's description of the protagonist's war-time psychological struggles as well as her descriptions of post-war Japan & Hong Kong.

But I became increasingly dissapointed as I continued through the chapters. There were too many smaller characters introduced at each new juncture in the novel, many left hanging. Similarly, it seemed that Hazzard wanted to impress us with how many country sites could be included in one novel; my travel-logged head began "spinning"!

Perhaps most disconcerting, I felt that the "good guys" were much too good, and the "bad guys" were much too evil to be believable. And I really couldn't connect with the "fairy tale" ending.

I wonder why the novel has been so well received; perhaps because of the underlying anti-war theme? If so, I could think of other novels that handle this theme in a much more eloquent, well-crafted manner.

Overall, it was an interesting novel, however it seems like it could have been so much better!

It must say something about the literary world that a book like this won the National Book Award. What it says to me is that there's a literary establishment out there that functions like a club, and that if you've acheived the right formula you get an award.
I think this is an almost unreadable novel, and I finally put it down after less than a hundred pages. I was so annoyed by the obscure prose, the impossible vocabulary, the syntactical wrenching, that I wanted to throw the book down and jump on it.
The author does occaisionally acheive some brilliant characterizations, but the characters themselves are lifeless and bloodless, and the tone of the work is morbid, elegiac and funereal. That may be her point but the way it's done lacks any vigor whatsoever. There is a thin plot line that is hard to follow because the author must pretty constantly take off in flights of obscurity and prose that is better suited for poetry; it would be appreciated and more appropriate in that context.
I can see why it took the author so long to produce this novel but I think it has a limited audience of those who may prefer forced, exotic hot house plants to robust commoner kinds.
Simply not my cup of tea.