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Title: The Great Fire: A Novel by Shirley Hazzard ISBN: 0-374-16644-7 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Pub. Date: 14 October, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.26 (43 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: No spark
Comment: I was very excited about this book but it did not fulfill my expectations. Shirley Hazzard is an excellent writer, and she has chosen an exciting place and time period (post WWII Asia) but "The Great Fire" lacked the spark to set the conflagration alight.
The main character, Aldred, has come to postwar Japan to write a book on the effects of war on an ancient society. He meets an Australian military family and is much taken with their children-a young teenager named Helen, and Ben, who is certainly dying. The parents are awful in the way of awful people in 19th century Russian or French novels in that they are so bad you know they're out there someplace. The children's lives have been so constrained that they live through classic literature. Although Helen is still very young, Aldred falls in love with her.
The other element of the plot concerns Aldred's friend Peter Exley who is in Japan to interrogate Japanese war criminals. His crisis has to do with how to spend his own future and whether he can he abandon his career in law to do what he really wants.
"The Great Fire" has a very 19th century feel about it. The characters behave in ways that seem more fitting to people in 1847 than 1947. It is a very quiet book where a great deal happens, but when the book is over it is hard to explain exactly what. I found Shirley Hazzard's choice of time and place strangely out of sync with that she expresses. Ultimately, the book fails to engage and seems more like an academic exercise in "good" writing than something meant to move the reader.
Rating: 1
Summary: Reading this book was a painful experience
Comment: I really wanted to like this book--the plot framework was interesting enough. But the execution--aaargh! Hazzard's language was excruciating to read. The dialogue was so stilted and unrealistic that it made me laugh out loud sometimes. And the characters were flat and undeveloped, as other reviewers have noted--I couldn't keep Peter and Aldred straight, they were so similar. I can't imagine what the awards committee was thinking when they gave this book the National Book Award. Yeesh!
Rating: 5
Summary: Ethereal, like an impressionistic painting
Comment: 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.
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Title: Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard ISBN: 0140107479 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 31 January, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Known World by Edward P. Jones ISBN: 0060557540 Publisher: Amistad Pub. Date: 14 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Brick Lane: A Novel by Monica Ali ISBN: 0743243307 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 09 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Today Show Book Club #13) by Mark Haddon ISBN: 0385512104 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 31 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Vernon God Little: A 21st Century Comedy in the Presence of Death by D. B. C. Pierre ISBN: 1841954608 Publisher: Canongate Books Pub. Date: 01 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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