The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

• National Library of Australia, Canberra, Australia
• Tucson-Pima Public Library, USA
• Lincoln City Libraries, USA
  

The year is 1947. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfil their destinies, others will falter. At the centre of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His counterpart, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself.
In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia's coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity
The Great Fire is a deeply observed story of love and separation, of disillusion and recovered humanity.

Shirley Hazzard is the author, most recently, of Greene on Capri, a memoir of Graham Greene, and several works of fiction, including The Evening of the Holiday, The Bay of Noon, and The Transit of Venus, winner of the 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award. The Great Fire won the 2003 National Book Award. Born in Australia, she has lived in New Zealand and Europe. She now lives in New York City with sojourns in Italy.

The main story concerns Aldred Leith, his adventures in post-war defeated Japan, and his love for the young girl, Helen. Many themes are tackled: the relationship of the victor and the vanquished; the justification for killing another human being; displacement (displacement not only of people displaced by war but of Aldred and Helen and her brother as well). These are all tackled in an interesting and informative way. There are moving descriptions of death - of the young Japanese who dies of humiliation, the description of the ship carrying away the dead body of Gardiner: "The little ship … passed among islands all glorious with morning, on a blue course channelled by minesweepers". There are vivid and evocative descriptions of places. The language however I thought unnecessarily convoluted at times, especially early in the book.

There are endless diversions into the past. New characters pop up and turn out to have long stories of their own to be related and problems to be discussed. All this became tedious eventually, and about half way through the book I began to lose interest. I think if the author had restricted the subject-matter and simplified the story it would have been a better book.

Member of Raheny Library Reading Group, Dublin, Ireland

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Thirty two year old Major Aldred Leith arrived in Japan in 1947. He had been wounded in the Second World War. He spent two year in China observing the changes taking place there and was commissioned to write a book about it. He decided to also include Japan in the book after the bombing of Hiroshima. In Japan he met and fell in love with a seventeen-year-old girl. The Great Fire tells the story of the difficulties of getting back to normal living amidst the chaos in Japan and the aftermath of war in Europe. He also had grave reservation about the age difference between himself and the girl. It is a well-crafted story. The characterisation is very good. The writing is beautiful, very formal and at times requires a good deal of concentration.

Member of Raheny Library Reading Group, Dublin Ireland

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This is a love story and we meet the hero, Aldred Leith, on page 1 travelling to a location near Hiroshima in 1947. He's an army man, a Major, on some mission one presumes on behalf of the Army / British Government. His path crosses with an Australian army family, obnoxious parents with two beautifully mannered children, refined and highly cultured and Aldred is creepily attracted to the girl. Fortunately, to our great relief and that of our hero, she turns out to be 17 years old. The love story to me is highly implausible, not least because of the objections of the parents who one would have thought would jump at such a match given Aldred's status and background - a 15 year age gap was hardly a great impediment.
Instead the various "digressions" in the novel are much more persuasive. For example there is the portrayal of Hong Kong with its lingering remnants of colonial society and where Aldred's friend Peter Exley is finishing out his wartime service and dreading his return home to, for him, a culturally arid Australia. There is also the vignette of Aldred's return to the post-war austerity of London in which his plush hotel retains all the trappings of past glories, but shows its new boarding house tendencies, reproving Aldred for being 10 minutes late for a pretty poor lunch. Another glimpse of colonial life is given of Wellington, New Zealand where the fiancée, Helen, is sequestered, awaiting her rescue by Aldred; not a flattering picture of a prim remote society, cut off from its roots in Northern Europe and seeming to yearn for that past.

However, overall I enjoyed the book, not least for its very elegant writing even if it is a bit mannered at times. Rating - 7-8 out of 10

Reader: Raheny Library Reading Group, Dublin, Ireland