The
contingent life
Brenda Niall
Shirley
Hazzard
The Great Fire
Virago,
$28pb, 314pp, 1844081397
London
seen through a haze of smoke and fire in J.M.W. Turner’s
famous painting, The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, is the
evocative cover image for Shirley Hazzard’s long-awaited
novel. The Great Fire comes twenty-three years after Hazzard’s
brilliantly composed, witty and ultimately tragic work The Transit
of Venus. Like the earlier novel, The Great Fire is ambitious
in theme and intricately structured. It explores the human response
to war and destruction, with the great fire of Hiroshima the immediate
cause of the novel’s journeys among maimed people and damaged
places in 1947.
Aldred Leith, a 32-year-old British officer with a heroic war
record, is sent to Japan to write his impressions of war’s
aftermath in the area devastated by the atom bomb. Restless, estranged
from his parents, divorced and uncertain of his future in civilian
life, he welcomes an assignment that will deepen his knowledge
of Asia. Having lived in Hong Kong as a child and later travelled
widely in China, Leith has broader sympathies than most of his
colleagues. He observes with growing distaste the psychological
distortions that follow the Allied victory. At their best, the
victors are patronising about anything Asian; at their worst,
they take self-aggrandising pleasure in humiliating the vanquished.
Images of death confront Leith from the moment he arrives in Japan.
A frail prison camp survivor, Gardiner, offers a ‘bone china
claw’ to shake hands. The two men talk about the disruptions
war has brought to private life and the near-impossibility of
renewing love. Gardiner, due for repatriation to Britain, dies
that same night. The next day, Leith, so recent an acquaintance,
is his only mourner.
Billeted in a military compound, Leith reports to Brigadier Barry
Driscoll, a belligerent Australian, and his wife, Melba, who has
her own style of ferocity. This appalling couple, whose satiric
presentation Patrick White could not have surpassed, relish their
newly grasped power. They do not distinguish between authority
and cruelty in their dealings with the Japanese. Leith’s
wish to learn about the survivors of Hiroshima brings instant
hostility:
Mrs
Driscoll was of middling height only, an illusory tallness being
created by her large forcible head and martial shoulders, and
by fluffed white hair that, upswept, made its contribution. Behind
spectacles, at the centre of a thick lens, the eye shone, small,
animate, and marble. To Leith, who went forward putting out his
hand, she said: ‘I’m sorry for you.’ A piping voice,
active with hostility. ‘Arriving on such a humid day. We’re
just going to table. We put in a proper table, we don’t eat
off the floor. But I suppose you like things to be Japanese.’
Hostility
deepens when Leith overhears Driscoll, out of control with rage,
abusing a young Japanese interpreter, who subsequently kills himself
because of the humiliation. Counterpointing the antagonism between
Leith and Driscoll is Leith’s friendship with Driscoll’s
young son and daughter. The son, Benedict, is an invalid, dying
from some rare disease. Neglected by his parents, who felt entitled
to healthy children, Benedict is sustained by the care and companionship
of his sister, Helen. And it is with seventeen-year-old Helen
that Leith falls in love.
The central situation thus becomes the predicament of the lovers.
There are formidable barriers: Helen’s age; her parents’
hatred of Leith; and the duties that soon take him from Japan
to Hong Kong, and home to England. During their separation, Helen
is removed to New Zealand where, like a captive in her tower,
she awaits her rescuer.
The characterisation of Helen is a weakness in an otherwise assured
and resonant novel. It’s not just the improbability of such
intelligence, beauty and gentleness emerging from the brutal and
vulgar Driscoll ménage. Perhaps it’s unfair to invoke
Tolstoy, but the obvious comparison for this story of love and
war is War and Peace and Prince Andrei’s first sight of the
enchanting young Natasha. In a novel replete with literary allusions,
Aldred Leith’s unusual first name may be intended to echo
Andrei’s. But, unlike Natasha, Helen is pure spirit and intelligence,
without a distinctive voice or physical reality. Describing her
as a changeling or a mermaid does not help. There is a finicky
concentration on Helen’s hands. One hand is glimpsed by Leith
at the dinner table, lying at rest among the ceramic cups and
red lacquer dishes. Before he can see Helen’s face or form,
he waits, alert as a birdwatcher, for the other hand to come into
view. In later scenes, her hands tremble, or are ‘turned
by nervousness into starfish’. This small imperfection only
underlines Helen’s idealisation as the only being untainted
by war or disease.
Fortunately, the love story of Leith and Helen is by no means
all the novel has to offer. It provides formal unity: it gives
Leith a purpose, but it matters less than the people and places
seen during his odyssey. His friend and alter ego, the Australian
Peter Exley, a former art historian who serves on a War Crimes
Tribunal, is a sadder and more complex figure than the rather
wooden Leith. The Hong Kong scenes, in which Exley struggles against
depression and self-doubt, are haunting and wonderfully observed.
On his solitary walks, Exley contemplates poverty, dirt and disease,
as well as the natural beauty of harbour and hillside. He dines
at Government House, where colonial power dwindles without knowing
its own absurdity. He shares quarters with fellow Australian Rystrom,
whose assignment is the War Graves Commission. In Rystrom, the
author hits the familiar target of the Australian male’s
crass humour:
Rystrom
said it was funny they should both be Australians, he and Exley,
and on loan to the British Army. He said ‘You War Crimes
lot’, and hooted like the siren. Rystrom could introduce
disbelief into anything: unmasking was his vocation. With suspicion
he turned over Exley’s Chinese and Japanese textbooks, his
volumes on international law: ‘A beaut racket.’
Rystrom
jokes about the fact that the War Graves job has given him ‘a
new lease of life’. Yet he suffers from nightmares in which
he relives memories of dismembered men and sheets of flame. Hazzard
does not give her cultured heroes a monopoly on psychological
war damage.
Reading this novel in 2004, Australians (and New Zealanders, too)
may feel that Hazzard’s satiric glances at antipodean provincialism
are outdated, forgetting that the Sydney of Exley’s boyhood,
from which he escaped to pre-war Italy, was the 1930s. Hazzard,
now in her early seventies, left Australia when she was sixteen
and has spent most of her life in New York. This is an historical
novel, as well as a novel about history, and its version of Australia’s
past has the authority of Hazzard’s own experience.
What lingers in the memory from this quiet, yet powerful, novel
are the scenes in which Leith and Exley take their solitary walks
among the ruins in Hong Kong and London. These and other scenes
could stand alone as short stories; they are a reminder of Hazzard’s
mastery of that form. Economy, wit, gravity and grace make The
Great Fire an outstanding work, in which the fuzziness of
the love story is more than compensated for by the richness of
the contingent life.
Brenda
Niall is currently our Critic
of the Month
