The Great Fire: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Please, somebody tell me I'm missing something...
Review: Unlike other reviewers on Amazon.com, who also did not have such a pleasant time with this novel, I did manage to struggle through to the end. And though I wish I could report that there was a reward awaiting me at the book's finish, I am afraid that I don't have such great news. As I approached the endless horizon of page 278, I started to experience a sinking feeling. The feeling of having been had. All of the prose and extensive vocabulary, (get a good dictionary if you sit down to read the book,) amounted to nothing more than the aesthetic of an intricate and ornate frame being shoehorned around one of those pictures of sports stadiums they sell at kiosks in shopping malls. A book that doesn't have a great ending can get itself off the hook as long as it provides us some pleasure getting to the end. This novel moves like a glacier, leaving vast canyons of lost time in its wake. Shirley Hazzard took a leisurely twenty years for this novel and now can say that I feel as if I spent it with her.

Ms. Hazzard's post WWII novel is a perfect example of what Harold Bloom criticized Stephen King for when it was announced that King would be receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award at the same ceremony where Hazzard would be receiving the National Book Award for The Great Fire. While showing considerable talent, Shirley Hazard has used that talent to produce a second-rate romance novel. Harold Bloom, referring to the King award, asked, "Whom are we going to give the award to next? Danielle Steele?" I would reply to Mr. Bloom that he should not worry, for they basically already have.

The more interesting characters of the novel are pushed to the sides, while we are subjected to the gossamer musings of the protagonist, Alder Leith, an interesting, well-traveled and brave British soldier, whom we are to believe is deeply in love with a 17 year old girl. After reading Ms. Hazzard's biography on the book jacket, I can see where she would want to portray a young girl as having the competency of Helen, the book's heroine/ingenue. Hazzard, according to the bio, was engaged by British Intelligence at the age of sixteen. However, I cannot believe that the emotional maturity levels of this relationship could support the true love that we are asked to take quite seriously in this story. I mean, didn't Nabokov render the last word on these types of relationships? Didn't he show us the hilarity and the pathetic self-centerdness at the heart of these May-December male fantasies?

Helen, who is the apple and the orange of Aldred Leith's life, is the literary set answer to the Britney Spears phenomenon, only she is decidedly more insidious. While the young pop-divas of today's teen hip-hop scene seduce men with their adult sexuality, but they also present a one-night-and-I'm-gone type of aura. The young Aussie girl, named for the "face that launched a thousand ships," is presented not only as an intellectual equal to the extensively educated and well-read protagonist, she is also loyal and easily able to maintain a mature and dedicated relationship over great distances. What? Please, somebody tell me that I am missing some sort of sharp satire. Please tell me that I didn't struggle through the book for what I ended up getting.

Oh, and if you need any more evidence of the unnecessary glacier pace of the novel look no further than the creation of some of the supporting characters. Peter Exley, one of Aldred's war buddies, who is prosecuting war crimes in Hong Kong, and his relationship with Rita Xavier, a native of Hong Kong, are far more interesting and the book jumps to grand life whenever they are mentioned. It is a sharp contrast to the nap-inducing travails of Aldred Leith and his little baby doll. (If you think I am exagerrating, read the end of the book.) After taking decades to complete this novel, you would think that Ms. Hazzard would have been able to see the appeal of these supporting players and would have dealt with Exley and Xavier more, or at least have effectively shown them as a mature contrast to Leith and his liason with his luscious, literary girl-woman.

There are better books out there. There really are.

Rating:
Summary: Truly Awful
Review: Shirley Hazzard owes me $24.00 for this book. Her pompous writing style obscures the basic plot to the point that I wanted to scream out loud. You feel nothing for the characters, mostly because their speech and thoughts are so affected that you cannot believe that they are human beings. The dialogue and speech is completely inappropriate for the time. She seems to forget that this novel was not set in Victorian England. Here's an example: "There was also fascism, rife in city and countryside. At night, young men held the gladiatorial battles of an unequal civil war." Personally, I cannot imagine an modern person speaking like this.
To be fair, maybe it gets better in the end, but I couldn't finish it. It was supposed to be my entertainment on a cross-country flight. I ended up reading the airline magazine instead. At least the magazine wasn't supposed to be an award winning piece of literature.

Rating:
Summary: Worth the 20-year wait
Review: Shirley Hazzard has been MIA from the world of published fiction for so long that I would guess that most of my generation has never heard of her. Her last book, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was written more than twenty years ago, and though it is now considered a modern classic it remains in relative obscurity. Having just finished reading The Great Fire, I can hardly imagine why a tremendous talent like this would take such a long hiatus from writing novels. One can only wonder at the many wonderful works of literature she would have produced, and we would have treasured, during these past two decades.

Hazzard writes with stunning emotional gravitas. She is one of the few writers who truly make each word count. This is a 278-page book that feels like it's twice that long, and I mean that as the highest of compliments. Each page is so full of meaning and feeling, each sentence so perfectly crafted, each word so carefully chosen. So much attention was put into the writing of this novel that one feels an obligation as a reader to devote extra time and attention to the reading of it. This is one of those rare books that could be read over and over, each time offering new insights and never losing its power.

The subtlety of the prose lends an understated sense of passion to the beautiful yet somewhat painful love story that unfolds between the main character Aldred Leith and the young Helen Driscoll. He is a decorated war veteran, recently arrived in Japan to document that country's post-war transformation. She is a 17-year-old girl, wise beyond her years, the brave companion to her older brother who is slowly dying of a degenerative disease. Their love is unlikely, and naturally forbidden by her parents, and yet it is so undeniably right. Hazzard convinces us of this, but gracefully so, as if simply leading us to our own discovery of what is true.

What truly amazes about this book is that it is about so much more than just this one relationship. There are no superfluous characters here; each has a purpose and identity in and of themselves as well as in their relation to the main characters. Peter Exley is the intriguing foil to Aldred, also a war veteran but one whose battle scars have not healed so easily. Benedict, Helen's ailing brother, lives with great spirit and courage and serves as a mirror reflecting the beauty within his sister's heart. Aldred's estranged father looms as a distant ghost. Aurora, the father's long-time mistress, brings Aldred somewhat painfully back to a past from which he has perceivably moved on. Even Professor Gardiner, whose appearance at the beginning of the novel lasts but a few pages, adds depth and significance to the pages that follow even though he never reappears.

Note especially the elegance of Hazzard's prose, how she seemingly reads the minds of her characters and gracefully transitions from dialog to narrative with a third-person omniscience that reads like first-person self-reflection.

The National Book Award committee has chosen well this year.

Rating:
Summary: Rebuilding
Review: This story is set in Japan and Hong Kong, England and New Zealand in the years directly after the 2nd World War. Although the title refers to the Great Fire of London, and indirectly to Hiroshima, the book is more about reconstruction, about remaking places and lives in the aftermath of destruction. It is about the re-ordering of the world, both through conscious human activity and alignments brought about by chance and time.

The hero, Aldred Leith, is still in uniform, somehow still part of the British Armed Forces, it is not entirely clear in what capacity. He is a 'war hero', not actively heroic, but relaxed and at ease, with grace and watchfulness. He is someone I'd like to meet. He makes decisions and moves carefully through the ambiguities of bureaucracy and military rule. He is self-contained and does not judge things as simply good or bad, but his mind seems to run forward and back over possibilities, working towards a best possible resolution. He does not hate those who are destructive, or officious, but side-steps them, he looks for ways through into a better place.

The scenes in London reminded me of Anthony Powell's series - A Dance to the Music of Time. Some of the threads of the story don't seem complete, but this may make the main story more believable, a small picture of a period of time, focusing on one man, with other things going on in the background.

Rating:
Summary: Radiation Sickness
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Flawed excellence at a glacial pace
Review: Shirley Hazzard's new book, The Great Fire, is a worthwhile read. The writing is excellent, as one would expect from such an accomplished author. And, toward the end, I found myself wanting to rush through the final chapters to find out how the man, Aldred, and his child-woman, Helen, would resolve their predicament; how, that is, would this man "rescue" this teenager from her doomed existence. I did feel a little uneasy -- I would even say "queasy" -- about this relationship. We live in an enlightened age of acceptance and tolerance, but this is a teenager we are talking about here. She's seventeen and he's thirty-three, not quite a dirty old man, but close (I kept picturing Ben Affleck with a British accent lusting after Britney Spears's baby sister). Here, the Australian girl is highly intelligent and well-read and is caring for her slowly dying brother, and her military man is a decorated war hero trying to gather material to write a book about the ravages of war in China and Japan, where he meets Helen in 1947. All of which helps us excuse the age-span problem.

The girl's mean parents are not enlightened enough to see all this and they try to keep the would-be lovers apart. The parents are so career-obsessed they cannot seem to care much for their dying son or their daughter's happiness, which does qualify them as villains of sorts, but I kept siding with them on giving the youngun a chance to grow up and find a lover her own age. Although a couple of other smarmy characters show up in minor roles, the other concrete "villain" in this story seems to be New Zealand, which I have come to love, knowing it is the true-life Middle Earth in the Lord of the Ring movies; I kept wondering why Helen would be condemned if she had to live there.

The true villains in this story are War and its partner, Time. The book is worth reading for this reason. World War II, that "inextinguishable conflagration," or, the great fire, has left much death and destruction, and events seem to present the threat of an even greater war, as new world alliances are formed. This is, after all, the start of the atomic age, and war survivors such as Aldred Leith and his friend, Peter Exley, are wondering why they bothered to survive: what is there to live for? For Aldred, that becomes Helen -- so we are inclined to forgive him for robbing the cradle. It is only a matter of time before war begins again. Therefore, live life to its fullest; that is the message: forget about Helen's age, live it up. But the story is also a matter of the possibility of Helen's wasting away in the ravages of time (if she stays in New Zealand without the man she loves). And he, Aldred, winds up back in England, from where it takes weeks and weeks to travel to that dreary land way down under. Again, time is the enemy.

This book is literary, meaning keep your dictionary close, especially for Latinate prose words intended, I suppose, for any long dead Romans who might roll by a bookstore in their rusty chariots. It is also British, so a "lift" is an "elevator," and so on, expressions we Americans stumble on. Still, the language is rich and rewarding in description of time and place, not just in China and Japan, but in England, Italy, and somewhat in other places. But many times, I wondered when we were ever going to get back into the plot. It reads like a railroad with many spurs: it keeps getting off the main track. That is rewarding in terms of characterization, both people and places, but it is not for readers wanting linear progression. For example, near the end I was irritated at reading a whole chapter about Helen's visit with two old ladies, which, I suppose, was intended to heighten the reader's sense of wanting a better life for the young girl.

A caveat on the fine writing: though this is a National Book Award winner (so what do I know?), I sometimes was irritated by what I judged to be an overuse of fragmented sentences, especially where pronouns were left out and verbs were used to start sentences. I became too conscious of the writing, instead of being able to follow the story without distraction.

Throughout the book, I had a sense the author was writing about herself. So I found it interesting that Shirley Hazzard as a teenager was briefly employed by British Intelligence to "spy" on changes in China during the period covered in the book. And I found it revealing that her parents were career diplomats, forcing her to have to relocate often, including to New Zealand. And she married a writer. That puts a wink in there. Bottom Line: I loved this book, wrinkles and all.

Rating:
Summary: hard to care much for the characters and their fates
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Hard to get into...
Review: Let me preface this review by saying that the author writes with a very elegant and ethereal style that somehow transcends the horror and sadness her characters observe and endure....but, that said, I just could NOT get into this book and bring myself to really understand and enter the minds of her characters. I felt as if I were watching this story unfold from a great distance, and that the author did nothing to unpeel the layers of their personalities and bridge that distance. I know it won the National Book Award last year, but it's due back at the library tomorrow and is just not compelling enough to finish....

Rating:
Summary: A woman's novel?
Review: Let me begin by saying how much I enjoyed a much earlier work of Ms. Hazzard's, The Evening of the Holiday, about a summer love affair between a visiting English woman and a married Italian architect set in Tuscany, which I found engrossing, touching, and true to life, in its tempting choices and painful results. Both the woman and the man were persuasive, and the evocation of the countryside and the Tuscan town was wonderful. In contrast, The Great Fire struck me from the first as lacking her previous insight into character, both male and female, fluency of description, and, one of Ms. Hazzard's great strenghts, both in The Evening of the Holiday and her first book, a collection of short stories called Cliffs of Fall, her splendid dialogue. In the opening pages, the exchanges between the Leith, the main character, and an Australian private assigned as his driver, are incredible. No two men talk like this, and if there are any male fiction readers out there who would pick up the book in the first place, I find it hard not to believe that they wouldn't put it down then and there. Ploughing on, I was amazed at the obscurity of the theoretically arresting scenes Ms. Hazzard was describing. We saw as if through a pea soup fog occuppied Japan and Hong Kong and all its peoples: the Japanese and Chinese were vague elements in the backround, a very colonial approach,to say the least. The parents of the elfin brother and sister were cliched grotesques, the children themselves offputting in their pretentiousness as well as incredible as they read Calyle to each other among other unlikely acitivities. The author asks us to feel deeply but never helps us along as far as the brother's illness is concerned, or the love affair that is supposed to make all the suffering of the war and its aftermath all right because our hero major is cheered up. Ms. Hazzard in her earlier work had a gift for aphorism: it is here employed in a caricature of itself to make fatuities sound as if they are bright shards of eternal wisdom. It is a great mystery to me how the author of The Evening of the Holiday could produce, to employ an English term, such tosh. Its critical success equally mystifies me, unless its reviewers and presumably its readers are overt or secret consumers of the unambitious genre fiction intended solely for woman, in this instance gussied up by a bigger vocabulary and a tone of High Seriousness.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, at first . . .
Review: 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!