Rating: 
Summary: Prose That Is Truly Poetry
Review: Ms. Hazzard has created an incomparable masterpiece in this book. Her prose is truly poetic. It is sensitive, philosophical, and deeply incisive. The winner of the National Book Award for 2003, it is one of the finest books of the decade. There are really few authors who are able to put this level of expression in so few pages. And each page is like a window upon somebody's soul, whoever she is talking about, as well as the reader.
Set against the backdrop of post WW II occupation, Hazzard expresses so many emotions and feelings in one book, that it is truly exceptional. With a basic anti-war theme throughout, she creates a love story, a very unlikely love story, that is the central theme of the book. But within, she shows us, despair, sadness, mutilation, ennui, elation and imbecility, side by side with love, tenderness, sensitivity, human kindness and purity of heart, especially, as that purity meets the cruel, real world. The book takes a very long trip through an existential reality, yet shows how such reality can be controlled, at least partly, by our decisions and actions.
With stylistic brilliance, Hazzard creates metaphors that are truly magical, and even uses some hugely effective and informative epistilary style with mail, that is not instant, but takes weeks sometimes to travel halfway around the world. Yet in the face of all this turbulence, this destruction, this horror, what may prevail as the strongest thing, is true and pure love. While the concept is surely not new, the manner in which Ms. Hazzard expresses it surely is.
This book is suggested for any reader interested in some of the most profound and exquisite writing to be found. It has appeal to virtually every group of thinking readers. It is a book that speaks to the reader on many levels, but to all of the readers, it has a way of speaking to them personally.
Rating: 
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!
Rating:
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.
Rating: 
Summary: Philosophizing and musings
Review: Our book club in the Philippines, XX Libris, feels the novel was written dispassionately, precisely to highlight the interior conflict of characters dealing with post-war impressions. Philosophizing, musings, and subtlety. We noticed the author's fondness for description in 3s with some alliterations. Samples: in the dark, in the rain, in the mud; conquest, plunder, fornication; bleak, grandiose, run-down; buxom, bridal, smiling; shadowy, grace, nearly wordless; the wound, the prison, the waiting; rain, mud, freezing cold; screaming, moaning, delirium, carnage; tetanus, gangrene, amputation; ourselves, our happiness, our adventure; hurt, hot, unresolved; grief, grievance, disbelief; remorse, rightful regret, responsibility; brown, virile, unwithered; towheaded, wordless, watchful; civil, easy, independent; small, rickety, irrelevant; clamorous, censorious, contentious world; heat, hills and colors. We had huge variations when we rated this book: we had a "4" and two "1's." Average rating: 2.1 out of 5.
Rating:
Summary: Flawed excellence at a glacial pace
Review: Shirley Hazzard's new book, The Great Fire, is a worthwhile read. The writing is excellent, as one would expect from such an accomplished author. And, toward the end, I found myself wanting to rush through the final chapters to find out how the man, Aldred, and his child-woman, Helen, would resolve their predicament; how, that is, would this man "rescue" this teenager from her doomed existence. I did feel a little uneasy -- I would even say "queasy" -- about this relationship. We live in an enlightened age of acceptance and tolerance, but this is a teenager we are talking about here. She's seventeen and he's thirty-three, not quite a dirty old man, but close (I kept picturing Ben Affleck with a British accent lusting after Britney Spears's baby sister). Here, the Australian girl is highly intelligent and well-read and is caring for her slowly dying brother, and her military man is a decorated war hero trying to gather material to write a book about the ravages of war in China and Japan, where he meets Helen in 1947. All of which helps us excuse the age-span problem. The girl's mean parents are not enlightened enough to see all this and they try to keep the would-be lovers apart. The parents are so career-obsessed they cannot seem to care much for their dying son or their daughter's happiness, which does qualify them as villains of sorts, but I kept siding with them on giving the youngun a chance to grow up and find a lover her own age. Although a couple of other smarmy characters show up in minor roles, the other concrete "villain" in this story seems to be New Zealand, which I have come to love, knowing it is the true-life Middle Earth in the Lord of the Ring movies; I kept wondering why Helen would be condemned if she had to live there. The true villains in this story are War and its partner, Time. The book is worth reading for this reason. World War II, that "inextinguishable conflagration," or, the great fire, has left much death and destruction, and events seem to present the threat of an even greater war, as new world alliances are formed. This is, after all, the start of the atomic age, and war survivors such as Aldred Leith and his friend, Peter Exley, are wondering why they bothered to survive: what is there to live for? For Aldred, that becomes Helen -- so we are inclined to forgive him for robbing the cradle. It is only a matter of time before war begins again. Therefore, live life to its fullest; that is the message: forget about Helen's age, live it up. But the story is also a matter of the possibility of Helen's wasting away in the ravages of time (if she stays in New Zealand without the man she loves). And he, Aldred, winds up back in England, from where it takes weeks and weeks to travel to that dreary land way down under. Again, time is the enemy. This book is literary, meaning keep your dictionary close, especially for Latinate prose words intended, I suppose, for any long dead Romans who might roll by a bookstore in their rusty chariots. It is also British, so a "lift" is an "elevator," and so on, expressions we Americans stumble on. Still, the language is rich and rewarding in description of time and place, not just in China and Japan, but in England, Italy, and somewhat in other places. But many times, I wondered when we were ever going to get back into the plot. It reads like a railroad with many spurs: it keeps getting off the main track. That is rewarding in terms of characterization, both people and places, but it is not for readers wanting linear progression. For example, near the end I was irritated at reading a whole chapter about Helen's visit with two old ladies, which, I suppose, was intended to heighten the reader's sense of wanting a better life for the young girl. A caveat on the fine writing: though this is a National Book Award winner (so what do I know?), I sometimes was irritated by what I judged to be an overuse of fragmented sentences, especially where pronouns were left out and verbs were used to start sentences. I became too conscious of the writing, instead of being able to follow the story without distraction. Throughout the book, I had a sense the author was writing about herself. So I found it interesting that Shirley Hazzard as a teenager was briefly employed by British Intelligence to "spy" on changes in China during the period covered in the book. And I found it revealing that her parents were career diplomats, forcing her to have to relocate often, including to New Zealand. And she married a writer. That puts a wink in there. Bottom Line: I loved this book, wrinkles and all.
Rating:
Summary: Ethereal, like an impressionistic painting
Review: Shirley Hazzard, the celebrated authoress from Australia who obviously subscribes to the dictum of less is more, took more than 20 years to follow up her famous 1981 National Book Circle Award winning novel ("The Transit of Venus") with yet another award winner. This time, she bagged the 2003 National Book Award for fiction with "The Great Fire (GF)". While critical reviews have been ecstatic, the reading public appears to be polarised between those who adore it and those who loathe it. Me, I love it because it's right up my alley - ethereal and cerebral, yet curiously gothic. The experience is akin to one gained from staring at a great painting and imagining the lives of its subject on canvass. Turner's impressionist painting on the cover of the British paperback version is particularly resonant. Readers who draw on the immediacy of emotions for their enjoyment of a novel may find the effect of Hazzard's writing style distancing, bloodless, sometimes even unreal. Hazzard's descriptive prose is spare, picturesque and precise, each word crystallising on the printed page like a hand picked gem. Her dialogue is terse, sometimes awkward. Nobody speaks like that, you catch yourself thinking, before you realise that maybe Hazzard never intended to capture the flow and cadence of natural speech anyway. Each word is laden with so much meaning there's almost a history behind it. GF is a challenging read but the riches within make the effort worthwhile. The post-2WW landscape in Asia as described by Hazzard is one of utter desolation, filled with ashes from the ruins of torn lives. The burden of victory oppresses the survivors as much as death and humiliation haunts the conquered. There are no winners. Aldred and Peter, the novel's two protaganists find themselves awash and adrift, emotionally disconnected and unable to resume with any conviction the lives they left behind. Fate, as it pans out, is kinder to Aldred than to Peter. He finds courage in reaching out for an innocent love and is finally redeemed by it. Peter is jolted by a squalid encounter with sickness and disease but his act of compassion signalling an unconscious desire to rejoin the living only brings devastating consequences. The novel's thematic coherence and rich tapestry of colours is reflected in its wondrous characterisation. Some, like the elder Driscolls - frightening in their ugliness, or the prophetic "Ginger" (Japanese POW), may not occupy much page space but they remain firmly etched in our minds long after they have disappeared from the foreground. They and the many others who make fleeting but memorable appearances are the glue that bind the story together. "The Great Fire" is like a finely chiselled work of art whose appeal may be limited to readers of serious literature. Clearly too, Shirley Hazzard won't be everybody's cup of tea, though readers who're so inclined will find GF an intoxicating read. A gorgeous novel.
Rating: 
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.
Rating:
Summary: Loved the prose, even when it was undecipherable
Review: The novel is the story of Aldred Leith, a mature, experienced man in his thirties, and his love affair with a 17 year old. The love affair is really a threesome, involving the girl's dying brother, and the relationship between the siblings is beautiful. There are a number of other important and interesting plot elements, but for me it is the writing that makes this book very enjoyable. What is remarkable about this is that The Great Fire abounds with passages I re-read several times without understanding, nor does Hazzard have the type of eye and wit of say an Updike. Reading The Great Fire is a little like reading one of the great essayists, who is always trying to capture subtleties of thought and feeling, and who thereby conveys a love of prose to the reader. As one reviewer put it, The Great Fire is both cerebral and ethereal. A minor point: Hazzard is annoyingly slow in conveying some details of Leith`s background in the beginning, such as exactly what he is doing in Japan.
Rating:
Summary: Like Bland Cucumber Sandwiches
Review: The premise of this novel was so promising- a love story between a 34 year old man and a 17 year old girl set against the back drop of the end of WWII and the bombing of Hiroshima. Unfortunately the book exhibits the detached observations of the British. The author uses pretentious language that is only available in the huge unabridged Websters. One could forgive this faux pas if the book was wonderful. Instead of a huge Italian repast we are served a light English tea with cucumber and cream cheese sandwiches. Skip this one. I only finished it because my book club chose it. However, most if not all of our members thought this was a dry pretentious novel which failed to fulfill its promise. Tho the protagonist makes a trip to see the sight of the bombing of Hiroshima, that is all we are told. There is no description of the site or the hero's feelings about it whatsoever. This is unforgivable.
Rating:
Summary: More style than substance
Review: There is no denying that the book is stylistically sophisticated, even poetic in parts. But that's really all there is to it. The book said nothing to me, did not really move me at all. It is a shallow love story about characters that never caught my imagination or my heart. Hazaard picked a setting that could have delivered so many important messages, and yet she ignores all of them. Nothing happens in this book. The story lines are disjointed and seem to have very little to do with each other. Background for characters is provided that does nothing to flesh them out or make them more human or understandable. Hazaard's prose - which I at first found extremely annoying because I do not think in sentence fragments as she obviously does - was cold and distancing. It takes more than pretty writing to be a great novel. It takes substance, and this book hasn't got it.
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