Customer Reviews

The Transit of Venus

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

So why on earth would anyone want to read The Transit of Venus? Some say the writing is pretentious: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. That word came to mind last year while I was reading Shirley Hazzard's 2003 National Book Award winner, The Great Fire. Yet I couldn't stop reading. Since I wound up loving that book, I decided to try this one, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award more than two decades ago (1980). Midway through my reading transit, on June 8, 2004, a Transit of Venus occurred, the tiny planet moving like a dot across our gigantic sun. (In 1769, James Cook set sail in the H.M.S. Endeavor to study a Transit of Venus and found Australia, hence the tie-in with this novel, which is primarily an Australian woman's transit through love and life.)

Reading Shirley Hazzard is like climbing a mountain, agonizing over the rocks and rarified air during the long, arduous uphill climb. Struggle is not the same as suffer. Most modern books are downhill sloped, where the reader floats or speeds effortlessly toward a simplistic conclusion. A Hazzard novel is more vertically inclined, where one needs to stop on occasion to catch a breath, and then, when the climax comes, you are on a mountaintop, not the valley floor. It is not a transit intended for aliterates, much less illiterates. Hazzard might not be the author for you if you don't know, and don't care about, the meaning of words like "impercipience" and "abnegation." Also, if you're less than thrilled with such lines as "Magnanimity shaped a sad and vast perspective," and "My task, as I see it, is to adumbrate the sources of his entelechy," then you might want to move along to another bookshelf.

However, if you want to read one of the finest novels ever written, grab a dictionary, take your time and don't miss a single clue in The Transit of Venus, such as the one embedded insignificantly in the middle of the first page. The importance of which is revealed only near the end of the novel. Hazzard does that to you; if she tells you, almost as an aside, that a trivial character is going to die one day soon, it could later on grab you by the gut that the mention was a portent of an even greater tragedy.

Although The Transit of Venus is populated by several interesting characters, and is propelled by their sexual liaisons, the central story concerns the trio of Caroline (Caro) Bell, Ted Tice, and Paul Ivory and the mystery that directs, and warps, their relationship even into middle age. We're told right off that "Edmund Tice would take his own life...in a northern city, and not for many years." The book never explains why, and does not need to, once the reading is done.

In the beginning, Caro, "established as a child of Venus," has come to England from Australia, along with her sister, Grace. Both sisters, orphans, are beautiful. While the "fair" Grace settles for a wealthy but unsatisfying married life, dark-haired Caro works for a time as a shopgirl and dallies with strategically-married Paul the gorgeous playwright, while Ted the astronomer can only simmer and settle for Caro's enduring friendship. When Caro marries a wealthy New Yorker, it seemingly dashes any hopes Ted may have for finally winning Caro's love. But in Caro's transit through life, such stability is not destined to last, and perhaps Ted has one last chance to possess the woman of his dreams.

As they move through the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies, we see a lot of the other characters, including Grace and Caro's half-sister, Dora, who seems to revel in misery, and Grace's husband, Christian Thrale, a government bureaucrat. Though interesting and well defined, these characters, and others, are largely irrelevant to the main plot, and I found whole chapters on them to be side rails that simply divert the reader temporarily off the central track. This does not mean the reading is not worthwhile; these diversions establish depth of character, and character exposition is one of Hazzard's strong points. A couple of my favorite lines compare a woman to her car parked outside: "Circular lamps, set over the mudguards, were glassily unlit like Tertia's eyes... Outside the window the car was kinder because suggestive of fluency and eventual animation." A cold woman, for sure.

Nevertheless, it is the Caro-Ted-Paul saga that leads to a revelation worthy, perhaps, of M. Night Shyamalan, and a "Sixth Sense" type of turnabout, one that makes you realize things are not quite what they seem. And it shifts the novel from a complex love story into another genre altogether. Any reader who fails to read the final three chapters misses out on the great reward; and to appreciate those chapters, you must read all the others related to these three main characters. Ironically, it is Ted, with his one disfigured eye, who is the most clear-eyed of them all when he thinks, "...the tragedy isn't that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts." He also observes, "Even through a telescope, some people see what they choose to see. Just as they do with the unassisted eye... Nothing supplies the truth except the will for it." And with these sentiments, he opens up the novel's heart.

With so many one-or-more-books-per-year "celebrity author" tomes now afloat in the sea of modern publishing, where the term "author" too often takes the secondary dictionary meaning, "one who assumes responsibility for the content of a published text" (meaning, not the actual writer), isn't it of value to strive through a work that has the feel of complex authenticity? Here, in The Transit of Venus, we can be fairly certain this is the genuine voice of Shirley Hazzard. Isn't it worth the price of admission to read not just a rare and beautiful voice, but a true and honest one as well?

Take the Transit.

The Transit of Venus is the only novel I return to again and again through the years. When Shirley Hazzard writes the line, "Although the dissolution of love creates no heroes, the process itself requires heroism," it speaks not to the mind trying to follow a plot line, but to the depths of the heart and soul. Early on in the book there is a scene, that serves no essential purpose for advancing the plot. The two would-be lovers are on a bus. The bus doesn't lurch and they are not thrown together in an embrace. Not moved by fate, their orbits take them in different directions. It's a very subtle interaction, one that will surely be lost on the Harlequin crowd. This novel took seven years to write. It is one of the finest, most delicately constructed works of art, you will ever read.

This is a beautifully written novel - when I finished reading it, I had to start over again. The first time I rushed through it, intrigued by the plot. The second time to relish the language.

It is a series of pleasures, combining an acuity of observation of human behaviour delivered with surprising, sometimes startling, similes and metaphors. While the content is not light-hearted, there is a warmth, humour and intelligence which comes through, so that the overall effect is positive.

I haven't enjoyed a read like that in a very long time.

At first, your club's poor opinion of TRANSIT shocked me. Then I recalled that I'd recommended it to a friend who also ran a book club in NYC; her friends were not quite as dismissive as yours about the book, but they too found it difficult to understand. Without meaning in any way to deride your taste or that of your circle, I can only speculate that TRANSIT disappoints because modern eyes are less than eager to embrace its very different style. You call it 'affected'; yet I assure you that I can usually spot affectation before the cover opens, and Hazzard is in no way guilty of such. There is to me a beautiful and rare RHYTHM in her writing. It is musical and poetic in the best senses of those words, and readers largely accustomed to the fourth-grade syntax and tone of most modern popular novels will, I suppose, feel lost. As for its being 'unintelligible': my turn to be lost. The lives of two sisters are followed, and that's all. They're followed with exquisite attention and fatalistic power, but followed plainly.

Simply put, I have read THE TRANSIT OF VENUS many times over, and am always astonished to find new layers of meaning in this exquisite tapestry of a novel. Following two sisters from their Australian childhood through their lives in London, Hazzard is uncompromising and true to her tale. The style is unique; the episodes thrilling. Lovers, husbands, places and careers are set before these two women and before us, and even the most cameo appearance of a character or scene is rendered with the skill, reality and destiny-laden force given the heroines. Even when that destiny is tragically small. This is a novel on a par with the greatest of Eliot. From page one, Hazzard reveals a world where Fate and personal nature duel, often to the cold victory of the one and to pain for the other. But there is beauty in the pain we see; for us, and for these women we come to know so well. No one who cares about modern literature can afford to pass this by, and TRANSIT is more than deserving of the many fresh reads I intend to give it.

It is hard to do justice to this masterful work. I finished it several days ago but the emotional images are still lingering. This is a wise, moving and many layered novel that absorbed my attention more than any book I have read in years. It is not a quick read, the style is somewhat formal, but the rewards are well worth the time investment. I expect to return to this book again and again over the years and I strongly recommend it for "readers" who find many books too shallow or light.

This novel was written with intelligence, insight and focus which demands the same from its reader. Shirley Hazzard assumes the reader is well read on matters regarding literature, poetry and international politics which is refreshing in fiction. This is not a light read. The language is dense, erudite, often the sentences do not breathe, but the story is engrossing and rewarding - suspenseful, until the last chapters when all is revealed.

It is almost audacious of me to attempt a review of this book. I don't have anything close to the command of language that Hazzard and some of her dedicated reviewers here do. Nevertheless, this is a favorite book of mine, despite what are, in my perception, some flaws, and I wanted to put in a good word for it.

First of all, let me assure my fellow readers that this book is in fact a romance, though a complex one. When I first read the book some 20 years ago, I was a young woman coming of age, on my own for the first time, and it spoke to me in a very personal way. Since then I've continued to dip into the book, parting the pages at random, to enjoy the author's language and her original characterizations, and particularly her descriptions of what it was like to come of age in a pre-feminist era. Here's a description from the novel, abridged and quoted somewhat out of order, of a working class career girl's life in the 1950's.

"Girls were getting up all over London....It is hard to say how or why they stood it, the cold room, the wet walk to the bus, the office in which they had no prospects and no fun....All the girls of London shuddered, waiting for the bus. Some had knitted themselves unbecoming brown Balaclavas, with worse mittens to match. Some held a boiled egg, still hot, in their glove--which warmed the hand, and could be eaten cold at lunchtime in the ladies' room."

I also enjoyed the novel's unusual evocations of time and place--- a child's upbringing in Australia; rural England during WWII; a WWII prison camp in Japan; the British workplace in the 1950's. Given the number of negative reviews on this site, I must warn that Hazzard examines these eras briefly, and the political and philosophic currents of each are merely alluded to, not explained. Hazzard trusts her reader to be familiar with the attitudes and undercurrents of each era, and simply alludes to them, while keeping her focus tightly on the characters in the novel.

Hazzard introduces scientific fact, political tragedy, and geographical oddities in a poetic way, which inspired me to further research: The best example of this her description of the Transit of Venus, an astronomical occurrence and the central metaphor for the novel; and a visit to Avebury Circle, a prehistoric monument which is rather less well known than Stonehenge.

I have two major frustrations with the novel.

1. That Caro is seen by the author as someone so morally upright and exemplary in character as to be practically separate from the rest of humanity. I found myself resenting Caro's beauty and moral perfection, and waiting for Howard Roark to bust in through the door with the rest of the Ayn Rand characters.

2. That, even as I repeatedly congratulate myself for finding the clue on the first page, I was incredibly impatient with the vagueness of the description on the last page. For years I simply wasn't completely sure how the novel ended. I trust that I've figured it out now, but I'd be curious to know if anyone else struggled a bit with the ending.

I was torn as to how to rate Shirley Hazzard's "Transit of Venus." Hazzard is an enormously gifted writer. But the novel itself had me asking the question: when does a great writer become a great artist? It's a fine distinction that one doesn't come across often, since such things unfold on their own. The discerning reader simply knows when they've read a great piece of literature. But Hazzard's own ambition here had me asking that very question. In other words, one gets the sense that Hazzard, in "The Transit of Venus," set out to write a great novel. There are certainly numerous stretches of great writing - but as a novel, I felt its Jamesian excesses turned the reading into something of an ordeal by book's end. In fairness, I think I prefer Hazzard to James in that she writes of Love in a more believable way - and I'm talking of Love as in Shakespeare or Donne. (And stuff actually happens!) People certainly don't talk like Hazzard has them talk - but any lover of language has to wish that they did. Hazzard writes prose that is better than most contemporary poetry. And boy, can she frame a scene, like placing actors on a stage - and with good lines! But such staginess is risky, and in long novel it can wear. Some of Hazzard's side stories, such as Christian's affair, or his wife Grace's near-affair, could have been trimmed. Also, the "political" insertions sounded just like that - insertions, or recollections of old anti-American table talk with Hazzard's good friend Graham Greene. Then there's the sense of time - it comes and goes. Yes, I get a sense of the fifties, but not so much the sixties or later. Such historical convulsions should of made more of a reading impression. In all it makes for an uneven reading effort - which is odd, given the precision of Hazzard's writing and plotting. But the good news is that Hazzard has written a great novel - it's called "The Great Fire."

This almost unbearably exquisite novel features shimmering, lapidary language; minutely observed, palpably real characters; joy and suffering in their purest, most elemental forms; and the mother of all revelations, about three-quarters of the way through. Hazzard's prose demands the complete concentration of even the most erudite reader, but it is a rewarding and even sensual experience to savor her sentences and paragraphs one by one.