The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
Breslin, John B.
WORTH THE WAIT The Great Fire By Shirley Hazzard Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24, 278 pp. John B. Breslin Shirley Hazzard's last novel, The Transit of Venus (Penguin USA), was published in 1980...
...intelligence officials, already busy laying the groundwork for American postwar hegemony...
...Countering these dark figures, however, are the war's true victors, young men from England, Australia, America who have experienced hell and returned with a hard-won maturity and courage that take little account of rank, and cherish the few sparks of love and friendship that have survived the inferno...
...Helen's parents win the first round, sending Benedict off to a research hospital in California and taking Helen with them to her father's new posting in New Zealand...
...He wasn't disappointed...
...The siblings live in a world of their own, buffered by literature against their harsh environment...
...In one case I had to convince a fellow Jesuit to ignore the rather lurid mass-market paperback jacket and just get into the story...
...I also read all of Hazzard's previous fiction and, more recently, her brief, delightful memoir, Greene on Capri (Far-rar, Straus and Giroux), which happily reminded me of a much briefer but no less pleasant meeting of my own with Graham Greene at Georgetown University in the early 1980s when he generously gave me, gratis, one of his stories to use in an anthology of Catholic fiction I was putting together...
...It entangles him with U.S...
...I read it with great pleasure and have recommended it since to many friends as a truly adult novel in the original sense of that much-abused phrase-a serious work of art that addresses central moral concerns with sophistication and passion...
...Helen and Benedict prove lucky in such friends...
...The mysterious American Slater wants to get his hands on Leith's report and will use all of his high-security clearance to succeed...
...Exley, a reluctant lawyer, has become involved in the Japanese war crimes proceedings, while Leith works on the secret Hiroshima report...
...The Great Fire (arriving twenty years on...
...John B. Breslin Shirley Hazzard's last novel, The Transit of Venus (Penguin USA), was published in 1980 to rapturous reviews and later won a National Book Critics Circle award...
...Helen's father and mother will happily sacrifice their children's welfare-even Benedict's life- to the father's career...
...And there is Helen's brother, Benedict, slowly dying of a disease without a cure, but not without doctors eager to experiment on him...
...Quietly, they support one another, do their bit to foil the schemers, and occasionally find superiors who value character over sycophancy...
...it has just won the National Book Award) reminds us of just how good a writer we have been missing in the interval...
...The novel's mood reflects its setting: the weary euphoria of victory after a prolonged and truly global conflict, overshadowed already by the mushroom cloud that has ended it...
...Love triumphs, but just barely, amidst the great fire...
...The other principal character is Peter Exley, an Australian would-be art student caught up in the war and bound to Leith by the conviction that he owes him his life-the most uncomfortable of ties for our hero...
...Leith returns to England but keeps in constant contact with Helen by letter, the only lifeline left to them...
...Like Transit, it is a love story set against a larger background, this time of war and its ravages...
...He is also falling in love with a young Australian girl, Helen, whose dyspeptic father is his immediate commanding officer, hell-bent on political advancement...
...After such knowledge, what forgiveness...
...Leith becomes their protector and mentor, rediscovering human affection after his combat in Europe, his harsh ordeal in China, and his own loveless childhood...
...Aldred Leith, son of a famous British writer and himself a recipient of England's top military medal, is writing a report on the aftermath of Hiroshima...
...Fellowes" is just one of several glancing allusions to Greene in the novel, this one a vowel longer than the name of the plucky English girl in The Power and the Glory...
...John B. Breslin, SJ, teaches literature at Ford-ham University...
...It is their innocence in the midst of so much evil that draws to them protectors eager to shield them and their love for one another, and Leith with them...
...On a sudden inspiration one evening in Hong Kong, Leith introduces Exley to Audrey Fellowes, a wealthy, unattached woman whose good sense and decency may in the end be the Australian's salvation, as Helen's love will be Leith's...
...For Leith and Exley the only answer seems to be those Freudian staples, work and love, both of which, however, have been contaminated by the impending struggle for power between the United States and the Soviet Union...
...It is Benedict's death that reunites them, taking Leith on a 'round-the-world odyssey to recapture his Helen while her parents are in California at Benedict's funeral- the final and most significant gift the dying brother could bestow on his beloved sister...
...It is a sparer novel than Transit, and more astringent in tone, due perhaps to its more than half-century of gestation...
Vol. 130 • December 2003 • No. 22
