Unprepared for Peace

...Faria or Eve...

...It is difficult not to agree with Eve Kimberly in her more cynical moments: "So much energy," she muses, thinking of Joe, "diverted into high-octane travel and adrenaline for the purpose of what...

...There is no afterward," Joe feels, "only the next fix...

...In Japan, Leith recognizes that an American dictatorship has begun, and Britain might as well count itself as one of the conquered nations...

...The Great Fire will receive a lot of attention: Hazzard's last novel, The Transit of Venus, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981, and this is her first fiction since then...

...Ignatieff, with his years of experience in human rights work, examines the moral ramifications of the news world and invites the reader to reflect upon them...

...In the process he sheds most of the accoutrements of the life that has left him so untouched, notably his wife and even, to a degree, his child...

...His work was an "illogical mix of elation and horror, of freedom from and enslavement to events in other people's lives...

...The new shoguns are the Americans...

...it has undergone "'a historic shattering...

...In those 100 years wars went from being relatively localized affairs whose casualties were mostly members of the military, to global conflicts that killed millions of innocent civilians...

...Just who does he think he is...

...Cowell, the reporter, seems to subscribe to the false, showbiz glamour of the profession...

...Like so many others, he witnessed unspeakable atrocities that have given him a sense of being "pursued by evocations of wartime violence, unexorcised"—but he is, unlike most of the others, intellectually and imaginatively equipped to face the darkest truths and to verbalize them...

...A war correspondent witnessing countless atrocities for 30 years, he has finally cracked, vowing to avenge the one victim who, among so many, has touched him most...

...The simple moral codes of tribe, and even of nation, have become hopelessly murky...

...One is compelled to act collectively, yet revulsion, compassion, will be felt privately, reciprocally...

...Joe Shelby, Cowell's protagonist, is a veteran war correspondent who has fallen prey to a mysterious neurological ailment, possibly Lou Gehrig's Disease...

...All could be exorcised with a beer and a jeer...

...The attack on whatever withheld itself in mystery—a woman, a culture, a work of art...

...War also became pretty chronic, making it difficult to tell where one ended and the next began...

...In any event, the very concept of vengeance is a questionable one...

...The story takes a strange and profoundly disturbing twist when the warlord, at the end, expresses his own point of view...

...The other is Charlie Johnson in the Flames (Grove, 192 pp., $22.00) by Michael Ignatieff, a political writer and social historian who is director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard...

...Some years back a photojournalist won a major award for a picture of a tiny African child dying of starvation, with an enormous vulture hovering expectantly nearby...

...Joe thinks A lot about his own "redemption," which he seems to define as proving himself man enough to climb Scafell Pike—no gimp he, at least not yet...

...How has this perpetual war served to change human expectations, human plans, even human nature...

...His legend...

...The novel goes over Shelby's self-indulgent shilly-shallying and, skipping confusingly backward and forward in time, also tells of the solitary climb he has insisted on making up England's largest mountain...

...Do we do too much reporting, too much recording, and take too little action...

...Between them is void...

...It did not even seem a cessation of hostilities...

...But Hazzard seems to see this less as cringe than as bluster and scoff, "a panic-stricken ribaldry passed off as virility, authenticity...

...It seems clear that no one born in the 20th century can feel the calm assurance of continuity that many people enjoyed in the past...

...she has roots, family, money, and responsibilities...

...Even at moments when peace appeared to have arrived, as in 1945, the general elation was tempered by an underlying suspicion that war, in one form or another, would continue indefinitely...

...What about several genuinely interesting minor characters who put in an appearance and raise our curiosity but never add much to the novel's scheme...

...The new order is embodied in a repellent Australian, Brigadier Driscoll, who is in charge of the Japanese port of Kure...

...At the opening of the novel he is in Japan, researching a book on the cultural shock Asia is experiencing as its ancient civilizations disappear with unbelievable speed and are transformed into ever-morplung new forms...

...A recent documentary film about war photographer James Nachtwey provided a riveting glimpse of the horrors he must by now take for granted...

...World War II, an orgy of bloodletting, was considered by the Allied nations to be a "good" war...

...perhaps worse, in Hazzard's rather skewed scale of values, they are supremely vulgar...

...Instead he seeks emotional succor from Etta, the efficient manager at his office—a middle European of considerable heart but few illusions...

...But what purpose is actually being served...

...Nevertheless, the myth of the war correspondent has continued to flourish...

...Why did he feel the world, this'—and her hands moved and made shadows through the light of the lamp on the table—'should owe us any explanation at all?'" As our television screens fill, day after day and year after year, with images of carnage—Sierra Leone, for example, has provided some of the most terrifying footage of all time—it behooves us to examine our roles as TV watchers and "consumers" of news...

...Decent persons are home by six, when they, too, perhaps, like the streets of their capital, fall silent...

...Joe's partner on his numbed Odyssey from one horror zone to the next—Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan— is his photographer, Faria Duclos, even more driven than he is, since she is also a cocaine addict...

...That is, until an unnamed woman burns before his eyes...

...That was what people said, who didn't know anything aboutit...

...the mockery, like the drink, being passing assuagement only, of the wound that would not heal...

...Hazzard can write with uncommon grace, but she walks a very, very fine line between grace and affectation, and the results are not always happy...

...As she burns, the woman throws herself into Charlie's arms for help...

...Wrapped in shabby darkness, women came shuffling, one with a great bundle of kindling on her back, another hooped under a strapped child...

...It was a mistake, she felt, for Charlie "to be so hopeful and therefore so angry" when the terrible deed was committed...

...The first renewal was coming east...

...each falling silent as the car approached, not meeting glances from these invulnerable strangers in their well-feduniforms...

...One is A Walking Guide (Simon & Schuster, 269 pp., $23.00) by Alan S. Cowell, a long-time foreign correspondent for the New York Times and Reuters...

...Enlisting the help ofhis longtime partner, Charlie embarks on a mission to hunt down the thuggish warlord and, if possible, to kill him...

...The highs blur...

...Two new novels by men with direct experience of their subject aim for the heart of the matter...

...They have tended to be unredeemingly ugly wars of attrition between rival factions of thugs, or between mutually intolerant religious or racial groups...

...While Hazzard expresses reasonable suspicion of Yankee hegemony, she reserves her bitterest ire for her own country...

...It was not addictive," he asserts...

...Ignatieff's work is infinitely tighter and more disciplined than Cowell's, and its moral grounding is far less solipsistic...

...One ofhis English friends remarks, "They keep saying, 'Britain is finished'—and with such complacency, as if it were a solution...

...even in novels, no one has talked like that since Iris Murdoch was in her heyday...

...Yet the reporter/photographer is not, in the traditional sense, a hero, because he takes no part in the action...

...In a village on the Kosovo border, he watches, stunned, as a local warlord commits a gratuitous murder, throwing gasoline over a nearby woman and setting a match to it...

...The Driscolls were disquieting," Leith thinks, "as a symptom of new power: That Melba and Barry should be in the ascendant was not what one had hoped for from peace...

...Prim, genteel New Zealand does not get off much easier...

...Now, as the series of violent highs, of ever more and grislier murders and gore, has finally begun to pall on Joe, and his own mortality is edging closer, he turns away from Faria toward a very different type of woman, Eve Kimberly, a white Kenyan...

...No one, we all know, talks like that...

...Although we now differentiate between the two Worlds Wars and the subsequent Cold War battles, including Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, historians are already beginning to look at the whole sequence as a single, if intermittent, conflagration...

...In freezing snows on the mountain, Joe actually consoles himself with the thought that, even if he were to die there, "his legend would survive where he had not...

...Rather, Charlie finds that his experiences have merely become blurred: "It seemed obvious to him now that he had been left almost completely untouched by his life...

...It was not until after the prize had been awarded that anyone reflected on the photo's implications: The photographer records such suffering for his own financial and professional gain, and for the benefit of a comfortable, prurient audience, without providing help for the child...

...The problem is that Leith, Helen, Benedict, and several more of her people come across too often not only as unnatural but unbearably precious...

...The brutal Driscolls preside over a scene of devastation: "Laborers passed them in pairs and foursomes, all moving downhill, all bearing burdens...

...This is the period Shirley Hazzard has chosen to recreate in her new novel, The Great Fire (Farrar Straus Giroux, 288 pp., $24.00), and the people who populate her traumatized world are "unprepared for peace...

...Will he complete his climb, limping and handicapped as he now is, or die in the attempt...

...the world has come too far, too quickly...

...It is full of the fine writing and well-put insights that have earned her a substantial reputation, yet its aggressive use of high-flown language and her provocatively arcane references can be irritating to the esthete as well as the philistine...

...There "virtue begins with self-effacement, and any sign of life is flashy...

...Which girl will he choose...

...One result of this is that war reporters or photographers, who are mere observers, have assumed heroic proportions, confirming the pre-eminent role entertainment (including news) has assumed in modern times...

...He has never, in any case, subscribed to the cliché of the cool, jaded war junkie...

...Can you understand me, Helen...

...Charlie Johnson might once, like Joe Shelby, have been in love with his own glamorous image, but after 30 years in the field that sort of vanity is in the past...

...The troubles in Korea are beginning to brew, too, and by the end of the novel, in 1948, Aldred notes that the press has begun to speak of war almost reassuringly, "as if it provided continuity...

...The problem is that it is hard to care much...

...They are, however, the parents of two enchanting, teenagers— Benedict, who is slowly dying of a never-named wasting illness, and the mermaid-like Helen, with whom Leith falls in love...

...Charlie eventually finds the warlord, and might be said to achieve redemption, but it is not the kind he had supposed...

...Michael Ignatieff's hero, Charlie Johnson, is also serious about seeking redemption, and has given it a more appropriate form...

...Eve is Faria's diametric opposite...

...Such questions lead one to wonder whether The Great Fire might be the first volume of a novel sequence, though no such possibility is mentioned on the book jacket...

...Does our constant exposure to these horrors make us more involved, or more detached...

...This death tortures him as no other death has, and the woman becomes emblematic of all the mayhem and destruction he has failed to stop during his career...

...It is true that they must daily face dangers unthinkable to those who sit at home watching CNN...

...The impassive Etta, whom it would be a mistake to call cynical, appears to have had the right attitude all along...

...Eve or Faria...

...the sense of private self...

...His attachment to his insanely dangerous career had become, he believes, that of a junkie to his dope...

...Passed off as truth...

...Why did Charlie believe he could get an explanation?'" she asks...

...The setting is post-Hiroshima Asia, primarily Japan and Hong Kong, and the central character is a 32-year-old Englishman, Aldred Leith, who was wounded and highly decorated during the War...

...European—civilizations...

...The American conquerors, with their determined anti-Communism, are calling the shots, except in China where Mao's power is gaining momentum and Communist rule is seen to be inevitable...

...He does what he can, rushing her to a hospital and getting badly burned himself, but she dies soon afterward...

...As with Murdoch, of course, Hazzard's stylized dialogue is purposeful...

...It appears to be Hazzard's intention, through dialogue, to mark certain chosen characters as preternaturally sensitive, the better to convict others of spiritual as well as verbal ugliness...

...For instance, Leith says of the War: "I've never had generalized feelings about any of it...

...Accustomed to constant action, travel and feats of derring-do, he is faced with a future of total helplessness as "one of those plucky souls in wheelchairs, beyond movement or speech but stubbornly insisting on remaining alive when, really, they had no further use for themselves and had become a burden on everyone else...

...Large cities destroyed, entire populations wiped out or banished from their homelands, systematic torture and maiming— all of these dreadful events became commonplace during the decades after August 1914...

...Emblematic, not particular: He does not even know this woman's name, and when he plays back the filmed footage of the event, he is unable, significantly, to see her face clearly...

...Since then there has been a seemingly endless procession of smaller but equally bloody conflicts...

...Why does she make such heavy weather of Leith's relationship with his father, for example, and then not follow through...

...China drives all else to a periphery, for a time...

...Worse, she lets any number of threads, both thematic and structural, dangle...

...Other Australian intellectuals have deplored or joked about "cultural cringe," the Australian habit of groveling before what they perceive as superior—i.e...

...Tired of it, perhaps, but untouched, as if it had all been just a very long action movie and no curtain...

...Driscoll and his wife are domineering and cruel...

...Ink on a printed page with colored photographs that became the detritus of long, tedious air flights, to be tossed aside, gathered by the cleaners, pulped...

...To believe in an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," Charlie realizes, "you'd have to believe that there was an order out there, which it was your business to restore...

...The two women are simply two different flavored lollipops, pure male fantasies, and Joe Shelby's ego is entirely out of control, although Cowell doesn't seem aware of the fact...