The Great Fire

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Summary: Don't miss The Great Fire if you love great books!
Review: The Great Fire will take you to another place, another time, but it is as real as the news today. The story Shirley Hazzard weaves of love, friendship, conflict and war is timeless.
This book is a masterpiece. It is not fluff and takes some effort by the reader. The reward is one of the greatest endings ever written. I will never forget this book. I wish the bestseller list contained more books published by writers as fine and experienced at Shirley. It takes a lifetime to be able to write a story this deep and this moving. Don't miss this one if you love great books.

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Summary: Opinion Polarised by Award Winning Author
Review: It's funny when the world of publishing throws up such a literary book into a popular arena. Shirley Hazzard is a superb writer, all of her books are outstanding but they are never easy and they are never, ever pacey. Personally I love her and re-read her slender output regularly. In fact she is probably my favourite of all writers along with Sybille Bedford (another obsucre old dame if you like). But if you like pace and accessibilty or a good airplane journey, the Great Fire will probably not ignite for you. It's well worth trying though - just make sure you are in a distant, reflective mood first and it might well win you over to her old-school and thoughtful world view.

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Summary: Masterpiece
Review: Shirley Hazzard has written a book that will stay with the reader throughout time. You will ache for the characters. You will feel like you are taken to another time and place. The power of the storytelling will leave you wishing for more, wishing the book would never ever end. When it does, read it again and again. It's a treasure. Thank you Shirley Hazzard for Leith, Helen and Peter. The time I spent reading your book is among the best I have ever had.

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Summary: My literary refraction
Review: Shirley Hazzard's book, The Great Fire, is a fine literary achievement, not for everyone, but for readers who wish to take their time and enjoy accomplished writing. The author clearly devoted many years to choosing her words carefully. And the reader should always consider the context of her words. For example, on page 107, a young woman enters a room in a restaurant and then withraws. And, in Hazzard's words, "Down her dark blue spine, the thick, glossy, lacquered pigtail flopped heavily in a life of its own; evoking, in Exley, by vigorous contrast, the inanition of far-off Pattie's pusillanimous plait."

Of course, if one is paying attention, one knows that the reader is, or should be, within the thoughts of character Peter Exley, who would suitably think in this playful alliteration. It is in keeping with the content and context of his character. No, The Great Fire is not for all readers, especially those with thin patties amidst pusillanimous plaits.

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Summary: One of the finest novels ever written
Review: Pay no attention to the negative reviews of this book. The Great Fire is one of the finest novels ever writ ten. The writing is from a wise, audacious hand and mind. Hazard knows her characters and their worlds and the writing, while beautiful, never gets in the way of plot.

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Summary: oi-vay!
Review: Don't do it! Don't buy it! You'll be sorry! Give the $24.00 to a homeless person in the street - better spent!!
I read some of these online reviews before I bought the book, - but did I pay attention to the negative one? Nooooo. I wanted to read this book so badly. I'm so interested in the subject matter, post WWII Japan, but for crying out loud, you have to wade through her archaic, disjointed sentences to get there only to discover that you have no bloody idea what you just read. So you have to re-read it, only to discover, it wasn't worth it. It's TORTURE! This book just is not worth the time it takes. I don't want fluff, I don't want Wal-Mart Book Club Best Seller, but I don't want to wade through THIS!!!!!!

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Summary: A Labor of Love, from both author and reader - and worth it!
Review: One expected the long awaited novel from Shirley Hazzard to meet with adulation. Hazzard enjoys the reputation of writing award winning books over a considerable period of time. She also is her own person and defies classification as a novelist, so unique is her style. THE GREAT FIRE was twenty years in the writing and reading it reveals why that is so. Hazzard writes with thick, pungent, fragmented prose. Her manner is one of revealing bits and pieces of a story in non-linear fashion: at times within one page she has covered several decades of reference without even a demarcation of a paragraph or inserted space. This technique demands total concentration from the reader and at least with this reader requires retrograde reading, reviewing previous paragraphs and sentences to assure that the story is intact!

And of course it is. Any time spent re-reading Hazzard's luminous prose is time twice blessed. Few other authors can bathe in phrases so articulate and wise that not only are they descriptive and additive, but they also can be read as isolated poems. "Our pleasures. He and I have killed, hand to hand, and have absorbed it. Can recall it, incredulous. Our pleasures were never taken that way, as by some in battle. Once, after a skirmish in the desert, a fellow officer whom he had never considered vicious had remarked. 'A man who hasn't killed is incomplete, analogous to a woman who has never given birth.' Embracing the primitive; even gratified."

The story: "The Great Fire" references the global devastation of WW II with particular empahsis on the nuclear attack on Japan. The year is 1947 and the characters are two men forever bonded by their experiences in battle. One is writing a book on the effects of the war on Asia and the other is trying Japanese war criminals. The lives tie and untie in the most fascinating ways. There is a family spilt asunder by the times - a brother and sister cling together, he with a degenerative nerve disease, she with the commitment to caring for him. There is a love story; no, there are love stories, and each fragment of story unveils the damage inflicted upon bodies and souls by a War without equal. Hazzard captures the post-war fallout that has become all too familiar in the past century as well as the present one. And it is this weaving together of disparate souls in a tapestry of fire and smoke and eventual vacuum that is the driving force of this novel. Romance has never been written so bittersweet. "As she walked, she put her hand to her mouth to hold his kiss, and to her breast to enclose his touch. The man, instead went to his own room and to his table - to those papers where the ruined continents and cultures and existences that had consumed his mind and his body for years had given place to her story and his. He could not consider this a reduction - the one theme having embroiled the century and the world, and the other recasting his single fleeting miraculous life. Having expected, repeatedly, to die from the great fires into which his times had pitched him, he had discovered a desire to live completely; by which he meant, with her."

No, this is not a novel for a quick read on a plane or to keep in the car for unexpected delays. This is a rare gem that deserves full attention. The rewards are inestimable. Think Virginia Woolf. Think Reliquary.

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Summary: The Naked Emperor
Review: The illustation on the jacket of the novel reproduces J.M. Turner's famous painting, "The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons," a conflagration that threatened a civilization based on law. Its counterpart in the novel is World War II and the fiery destruction of Hiroshima. This straightforward comparison is the only obvious thing about this novel, which makes for a difficult read. There are certain books that however beautifully written, do not amount to the sum of their parts. Hazzard gives us a gorgeously robed empoeror, or so it seems, but the question is if his robes are what they seem, or if they are made of air.
The novel opens with the arrival in Japan of Aldred Leith, a hero with a background the details of which we learn only in time, and even then indirectly, through what other characters say and how they react to him. Divorced, traumatized by the war, he is in Japan to study the impact on the survivors of Hiroshima. Right away, he meets Benedict and Helen Driscoll, the brilliant, young--twenty and seventeen--son and daughter of an impossible Austalian couple with whom Leith is billeted. Benedict is dying of a degenerative disease and soon Helen will be left alone, loveless, and at the mercy of her awful parents.
Helen and Leith fall in love, and the novel is the story of their overcoming of the odds that confront them in the shape of their age difference, the antagonism of Helen's parents, and a world in despair, still devastated by war. Few of the characters know what they want or how they will get it when they do know; everyone is passive, suspended, demoralized by the effects of the great fire, the war. Leith returns to England, Helen is taken to Australia by her parents, Benedict is dying alone in California. When the lovers finally take the initiative and come together, Leith having traveled to Australia to rescue Helen from exile, Helen having rebelled against her parents, he thinks to himself, "Many have died. But not she, not he; not yet."
This is, in fact, the last line of the novel, and it is the most direct statement of what Hazzard is up to in a narrative that works almost entirely by understatement and indirection. Beautifully written, it is nonetheless a frustrating book to read, perhaps because the portentousness and weightiness of the prose lead the reader to expect more than Hazzard gives. At the heart of the difficulty is the central love affair. The attraction between Leith and Helen is first sparked by their mutual love of literature and Helen's appreciation of Leith's kindness to her dying brother. She falls in love with his love for Benedict--almost, at least according to Othello, Desdemona loves him first for "the dangers I had pass'd / And I lov'd her that she did pity them." Indeed, there is a Shakespearean quality to Helen, who sometimes resembles the youthful heroines of the comedies, Rosalind in As You Like It, for instance, or Viola in Twelfth Night.
But ultimately, as with any fictional relationship, the reader has to accept this unlikely pair, and therein lies the rub for those who cannot, of which I am one. In the end then, although I found myself constantly rereading paragraphs simply to savor the beauty of Hazzard's prose, I decided the emperor was naked.

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Summary: Too much perfume gives me a headache.
Review: The reflex on several occasions involved hitting my forehead with the palm of my hand and the exclamation, "Oh brother."

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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!