Travelling far without finding home
Anita Brookner
THE GREAT FIRE by Shirley Hazzard Virago, f15.99, pp. 314, ISBN 1860498906 This unusual and nostalgic novel comes from a writer whose last work, The Transit of Venus, remains as startling and effective today as it did when it was published in 1980. The Transit of Venus was an openended love story whose development could only be pieced together from clues dropped unobtrusively in the text and which had to be assembled by the reader after some cogitation. Like Nabokov, Shirley Hazzard clearly believes that Fate has the best plots. The lovers, brought together at the close, are divided for ever
by an accident barely signalled but as conclusive as death. Both had followed parallel paths but were distracted by other alliances, other displacements, which they were only able to overcome by virtue of that same fate that ultimately divided them. The shape was classical, the feeling utterly romantic. The Transit of Venus remains one of the most thoroughly successful novels of the last 20 years.
The Great Fire operates on a broader canvas. The year is 1947 and the fire alluded to is the second world war. Aldred Leith, a brilliant soldier, has succeeded to the unwished-for maturity known to those whose youth was merely a pretext for the experiences that put an end to it. His theatre of operations was the Far East, to which he has returned on a briefing to report back on the post-Hiroshima situation in Japan. In fact his duties are nebulous: he evolves in barracks, compounds, temporary billets, in one of which he encounters the two children of the medical administrator of Kure, Benedict and Helen. The three of them enjoy an extraordinary closeness which is at all times threatened: the boy, Benedict, is suffering from a mortal disease and is attended by his devoted sister Helen. There can only be one, or rather two outcomes to this particular situation, and they are both reached after an infinity of temporary wanderings in which specificity — the names
of streets, shops, accidental meetings — constitute most of the action, Aldred Leith has a friend, Peter Exley; it is one of those wartime friendships that are founded on sympathy but little previous knowledge. Based in Hong Kong, Exley too has nebulous duties; both men are witnesses, assessing an all too real situation. In fact the two men are more or less interchangeable. Their backgrounds remain vague, although the main facts are Out in the open: Leith is the son of a Graham Greene-like novelist, while Exley is an art historian. Both fulfil the requirements of the solitary disabused hero, though neither is given to regret, to confession or to loss of nerve. It is in fact through their tactfulness that they are able to communicate, and Exley knows as much of Leith's so far unspoken love as Leith knows himself.
This love is of the sort generally frowned upon, between a battle-scarred hero and a girl who is 14 or 15 when they first meet. The two children, Benedict and Helen, are doomed on the one hand, saved on another. The only false note is present in the form of Benedict's unusual sagacity: he speaks in the clipped sophisticated tones of a mature man, the man he is destined never to become. This may have been brought about by his illness or by the author's desire to introduce a knowingness she has been successful in suppressing. The surface of the novel is busy with an enormous sense of movement, as all alliances are haphazard, largely unsought, and above all temporary.
Only Leith and Helen manage to overcome their precarious situation. Despite the disparity in their ages they are as mature as each other and as morally above board. In fact their values are impressive, and their letters to one another exalted by any standards_ This is a novel of high seriousness, only occasionally marred by unreality. That in itself can be seen to proceed from circumstances of time and place. It is the time and place that remain the novel's salient features.
All the characters are marked by an atmosphere of past and lost idealism. Reprieve is sought in different countries. for Helen in New Zealand, for Aldred in England. Remoteness is all-pervasive, a state of mind rather than of geography, 'They had left their destinations behind them, and could only recreate there their lesser emblems.' One glimpses the fatigue of great distances crossed, and of all the strenuous journeys which are brought together — just — one early morning in a meeting which remains obstinately far from home: a tragedy averted by virtue of the author's indulgence. She has been at her best when on the sidelines, describing not passion but passion's humdrum context. To blame her for this indulgence would be ungenerous. Better to enjoy a love story that surprises by its intensity.
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