 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
The Great Fire
By Shirley Hazzard
Virago $28.00
 Sydney-born Shirley Hazzard, who left our shores in 1947, at the age of 16, won acclaim and many awards for her 1980 novel The Transit of Venus, about two Australian sisters who emigrate to England in the years after WWII.
In a twist stranger than fiction, Hazzard, whose parents travelled widely in the course of diplomatic postings, was engaged by British intelligence to monitor the civil war in China - one of the pursuits followed by the Chinese-fluent Aldred Leith, the main character in this new novel, 23 years in the writing.
Later, she spent a decade working in the UN, a body she would condemn in her 1973 book, Defeat of an Ideal.
As this tale opens, the 32-year old Leith, a decorated British army officer, is going by train to a provincial posting in occupied Japan. The war is two years over, the population is 'famished and threadbare' and the victors are travelling 'at their ease, inviolable in their alien uniforms.'
Discomfited by the experience, Leith produces a book from his pack, written by his father, a geologist turned author who took his wife and children on the road when he went exploring foreign terrain.
He is met by an Australian soldier named Talbot, the sole antipodean to whom Hazzard, in an echo of Germaine Greer, shows the least affection. Her distaste even extends to the residents of New Zealand, the country where the tale ends with Leith in the arms of Helen, 15 years younger than himself, who has managed to escape the clutches of her boorish Australian parents, military administrators whom Leith meets towards the end of their Japanese posting.
He delights in their children, the charming Helen and her seriously ill brother, Benedict, less so in the blustering Brigadier Driscoll and his snobbish wife who greets Major Leith in a 'piping voice, active with falsity'.
'We're just going to the table', she almost sneers. 'We put in a proper table, we don't eat off the floor. But I suppose you like things to be Japanese.'
Leith forms an affection for the siblings, then a scarcely-admitted love for Helen whose image will possess him for a year of travels through China, Hong Kong and ultimately to post-war London for the funeral of his father.
A delicate courtship-by-correspondence survives amidst fiery images, including the Blitz and the bombing of Hiroshima, resolving satisfyingly on the last page and prompting the hope that Hazzard's next book will not take another two decades.
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