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The Great Fire
by Shirley Hazzard
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. 288 pages.
Reviewed by Carolyn Burns Bass
Critically acclaimed author Shirley Hazzard writes with confident strokes of minimalist color, almost without deference to the rules of fiction: Show don’t tell, avoid lengthy didactic dialog, create three-dimensional, individualistic characters, foreshadow climatic events. Every novelist has heard these rules ad nauseam, while readers don’t even realize it’s what keeps them turning pages. And yet books are born that break every rule and flourish to the lavish praise of literary critics. In an industry that crowns the over-wrought, predictable pulp of pop fiction, books like Hazzard’s separate the royalty from the celebrity.
A romance by classical definition, The Great Fire is as different from pop romance as beer is to champagne. It’s true that both drinks fizz. But aside from the bubbles, connoisseurs of each would heartily praise the merits of their preference. Like beer, pop romance is hastily produced and rushed to the market for mass consumption, while the literary champagnes are meticulously fermented under exacting conditions and have shelf lives longer than “The Book of the Month.” And like beer to champagne, it all comes down to taste: beer drinkers prefer beer and champagne drinkers prefer champagne. The Great Fire is champagne.
Classic romance isn’t about romantic situations with beautiful heroines and muscle-bound heroes. In fact, it’s not so much about romance as much as it is a study on human emotion played in the lives of its characters. It’s not about lovers, it’s about love -- love that endures through cultural differences, adversity, separation, and tragedy. The Great Fire is all of that.
Presumably referring to the bombing of Hiroshima, The Great Fire is less about the scorched soul of Hiroshima and more about the fires that rage in people. Take Aldred Leith, a decorated thirty-two-year-old WWII hero and place him where the only available female within miles is a beautiful ingénue, wise-beyond-her-16-years. Add a good dose of pathos for the girl’s critically ill brother, instant enmity with a set of bullying parents, and you have a classic triangle of romance. Stir in a side story about Aldred’s former lovers, plus a tragic friendship with an old war buddy and there are enough pages to turn out a critically acclaimed novel from a top-shelf literary novelist. The protagonist of the side story, Peter Exley, kindred to Aldred in spirit and character, provides a back fire that burns almost independently of the main fire.
The Great Fire smolders from chapter one, flickering hints of explosive passion in its protagonist -- the jaded war-hero Aldred Leith. In Aldred’s inner-circle, everyone is refined, gentle and erudite like him. Take the young and lovely Helen and her brother Benedict for example. Helen and Benedict are the two youngest offspring of a high-ranking Australian brigadier and his shrewish wife. A victim of the rare neurological disease Freidrich’s Ataxia, Benedict relies on Helen as part nurse, part confidant, and part student to his intellectual brilliance. Practically exiled with their parents to a military base in south western Japan during the post-WWII occupation, Benedict and Helen have nothing but each other-until Aldred enters their lives. The famous, war-decorated Aldred Leith, ostensibly encamped at the base to write a book about the effect of the conquerors on the conquered, grows attached to the brother and sister first by common interest in literature, and then because of his passionately restrained love for Helen. Aldred recognizes the “difficulties” of his love for Helen, not so much in the age difference, but in that Helen’s parents take an early dislike to Aldred and never change their mind. After Benedict is sent off for experimental treatment in California, knowing it will be a death sentence for the ailing young man, Aldred and Helen turn to each other in their loss. A deliberate stay of desire restrains Aldred from taking Helen to bed, forestalling the passion smoldering between the two of them. Enduring a separation as far as England is from Australia, the eventual death of Benedict draws the lovers together in a bittersweet conclusion.
The Great Fire is Hazzard’s fourth novel and a National Book Award Winner. Her previous novel, the critically acclaimed The Transit of Venus, was released in 1981. Twenty three years is adequate time to age world-class champagne. The same goes for literature.
A lover of stories, Carolyn Burns Bass is the author of The Nexus, an odyssey into twelfth-century England, where the present meets the past at the gate of eternity. Look her up at Word Art Solutions.
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