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Summary: Our book club loved it!
Review: Delicious writing (although you may want to keep a dictionary handy) and you really care about the characters. The descriptions are wonderful (' a calligraphy of trees..."). The book is not a quick read but it worth it. The best compliment is that the twelve members of our book club who represent a very diverse group of women all agreed that The Great Fire truly deserved to win the National Book Awayd.
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Summary: Should be set on fire
Review: I am so sorry to give this review but I was not able to get past the authors elliptical writing style. The plot was too slow and combined with her long awkward style........ I had to give up. Sorry......
Rating:
Summary: Subtle, Understated, Beautiful, Deadly!
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: No spark
Review: I was very excited about this book but it did not fulfill my expectations. Shirley Hazzard is an excellent writer, and she has chosen an exciting place and time period (post WWII Asia) but "The Great Fire" lacked the spark to set the conflagration alight. The main character, Aldred, has come to postwar Japan to write a book on the effects of war on an ancient society. He meets an Australian military family and is much taken with their children-a young teenager named Helen, and Ben, who is certainly dying. The parents are awful in the way of awful people in 19th century Russian or French novels in that they are so bad you know they're out there someplace. The children's lives have been so constrained that they live through classic literature. Although Helen is still very young, Aldred falls in love with her. The other element of the plot concerns Aldred's friend Peter Exley who is in Japan to interrogate Japanese war criminals. His crisis has to do with how to spend his own future and whether he can he abandon his career in law to do what he really wants. "The Great Fire" has a very 19th century feel about it. The characters behave in ways that seem more fitting to people in 1847 than 1947. It is a very quiet book where a great deal happens, but when the book is over it is hard to explain exactly what. I found Shirley Hazzard's choice of time and place strangely out of sync with that she expresses. Ultimately, the book fails to engage and seems more like an academic exercise in "good" writing than something meant to move the reader.
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Summary: Fantastic!
Review: The time frame for this historical novel is 1947-48, taking place primarily in East Asia, soon after the end of World War II. Ms Hazzard paints a panorama of a world ravaged by war through her flowing prose and with great descriptive clarity. At the heart of the story is Aldred Leith, who is an English officer, and has come to chart the physical damage incurred throughout the war, particularly Hiroshima. He finds not only this but great psychological damage to the prideful Japanese people. In time he falls in love with a young girl living in occupied Japan who is caring for her physically disabled brother. Using parallel narratives, we meet Aldred's Australian friend Peter Exley who is investigating Japanese war crimes in Hong Kong. Exley is facing a life changing decision, deciding what to do with the rest of his life. I was emotionally drawn into this novel and couldn't put it down. Many of the feelings of sadness and turmoil by rescuers and heros can be applied to our current situation in Iraq. A quote from the book sums it up as "the Chinese maxim whereby one becomes responsible for the life one saves". I would highly recommend this book.
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Summary: Reading this book was a painful experience
Review: I really wanted to like this book--the plot framework was interesting enough. But the execution--aaargh! Hazzard's language was excruciating to read. The dialogue was so stilted and unrealistic that it made me laugh out loud sometimes. And the characters were flat and undeveloped, as other reviewers have noted--I couldn't keep Peter and Aldred straight, they were so similar. I can't imagine what the awards committee was thinking when they gave this book the National Book Award. Yeesh!
Rating:
Summary: Ethereal, like an impressionistic painting
Review: Shirley Hazzard, the celebrated authoress from Australia who obviously subscribes to the dictum of less is more, took more than 20 years to follow up her famous 1981 National Book Circle Award winning novel ("The Transit of Venus") with yet another award winner. This time, she bagged the 2003 National Book Award for fiction with "The Great Fire (GF)". While critical reviews have been ecstatic, the reading public appears to be polarised between those who adore it and those who loathe it. Me, I love it because it's right up my alley - ethereal and cerebral, yet curiously gothic. The experience is akin to one gained from staring at a great painting and imagining the lives of its subject on canvass. Turner's impressionist painting on the cover of the British paperback version is particularly resonant. Readers who draw on the immediacy of emotions for their enjoyment of a novel may find the effect of Hazzard's writing style distancing, bloodless, sometimes even unreal. Hazzard's descriptive prose is spare, picturesque and precise, each word crystallising on the printed page like a hand picked gem. Her dialogue is terse, sometimes awkward. Nobody speaks like that, you catch yourself thinking, before you realise that maybe Hazzard never intended to capture the flow and cadence of natural speech anyway. Each word is laden with so much meaning there's almost a history behind it. GF is a challenging read but the riches within make the effort worthwhile. The post-2WW landscape in Asia as described by Hazzard is one of utter desolation, filled with ashes from the ruins of torn lives. The burden of victory oppresses the survivors as much as death and humiliation haunts the conquered. There are no winners. Aldred and Peter, the novel's two protaganists find themselves awash and adrift, emotionally disconnected and unable to resume with any conviction the lives they left behind. Fate, as it pans out, is kinder to Aldred than to Peter. He finds courage in reaching out for an innocent love and is finally redeemed by it. Peter is jolted by a squalid encounter with sickness and disease but his act of compassion signalling an unconscious desire to rejoin the living only brings devastating consequences. The novel's thematic coherence and rich tapestry of colours is reflected in its wondrous characterisation. Some, like the elder Driscolls - frightening in their ugliness, or the prophetic "Ginger" (Japanese POW), may not occupy much page space but they remain firmly etched in our minds long after they have disappeared from the foreground. They and the many others who make fleeting but memorable appearances are the glue that bind the story together. "The Great Fire" is like a finely chiselled work of art whose appeal may be limited to readers of serious literature. Clearly too, Shirley Hazzard won't be everybody's cup of tea, though readers who're so inclined will find GF an intoxicating read. A gorgeous novel.
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Summary: An imaginative romance shackled by the narrative voice
Review: Here's a story many readers would love: on the outskirts of Hiroshima, members of the victorious Allied forces look for love, for redemption, for recovery. A 17-year-old girl, caring for her terminally ill brother, and a much older British veteran, finishing his research for a book on Asia, fall in love amidst the ruins. The (still chaste) couple are then separated by her "evil" parents and they (more or less) wander the earth hoping to be reunited. And I did love the story; it's about as old-fashioned a romance as you can find these days. But the author's prose threatens to swamp an otherwise insightful, magical book. The New York Times reviewer is kind, noting that although "Shirley Hazzard has a blithe disdain for postmodern pieties. . . . her elliptical style will quickly try the patience of all but the most devoted reader." Another reader comments here that "The dialogue and speech [are] completely inappropriate for the time. She seems to forget that this novel was not set in Victorian England." Both these criticisms hone in on the problems I have with this book. It's not her prose style that's Victorian: Hazzard's writing is definitely modern (i.e., "elliptical"), but her narrative voice is from a previous century. She borrows Trollope's brain and writes with Joyce's pen. The result is a clinical detachment that can be intrusive and jarring: as omniscient narrator, she tends to spell out the psychological state of her characters rather than allow their actions and behaviors to speak for themselves. At times, it's like reading a New Age psychology text: "Attempts, with Rita Xavier, to deliver something of his soul always miscarried. But he returned to them--because he could not help believing in the sensibility of wounded persons. Or because he could not leave well enough alone." A second, equally irritating fault is the character of Helen; her depiction is fiction as hagiography. Her romantic perfectionism is tiresome: I found her believable neither as an adolescent girl nor as a youth wise beyond her years. Hazzard seems intent on proving that, without miracles and martyrdom, it's difficult to make saints all that interesting. Nevertheless, those readers who are willing to tackle the challenging prose and forgive the thin characterizations will be gratified by a stirring romance.
Rating: 
Summary: Dreamy and pensive literature
Review: On the back cover of "The Great Fire," Michael Cunningham, author of "The Hours," has a blurb raving about the book. I thought this was fitting, as Hazzard's book, stylistically speaking, is very similar to "The Hours". In this novel, Hazzard does not rely on characters or plot to absorb the reader, but instead lets the writing style speak for itself. If you enjoy reading books such as "The Hours" or "The English Patient", then I think you will enjoy "The Great Fire" very much. The plot is this: Aldred Leith, a decorated hero of WWII is writing a book on the Asian war, and living in Japan, where he falls in love with a literary youngish girl, Helen. Their love story is the centerpiece of the novel, although there are other varied characters that Hazzard introduces. All of the characters are struggling to find life in the dark aftermath of war. All the characters are likeable, and all are rather poorly developed. Instead of focusing on individual character traits, the book instead unfolds along a single theme of redemption, and the characters move along with this theme unquestioningly. There is little conflict and little excitement. But before you dismiss this book as too boring and too drab, Hazzard does offer something that few recent novelists have: a beautiful and entrancing writing style that will pull you along, slowly but surely. Because of the literary nature of the book, the converstation is stilted, and it is true that the characters do not talk in a 'realistic' style, but instead in a high form of English that is hard to settle with modern society. I felt this did not subtract from the book, but instead added to its dreamlike and pensive quality, making this a truly escapist novel. But it is not an easy one. Expect to spend a good amount of time reading this book, and to take a lot of rests between chapters. If you pick up this book hoping for a war novel that will rivet your attention from beginning to end, look elsewhere. But if you are looking for a book that is worth the time it takes to invest, that will make you think, and will make you appreciate the beauty of the written word, "The Great Fire" will more than satisfy you. Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: The novel is even more poignant given Iraq
Review: 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.
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