The Great Fire [Anglais] [Broché]

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.

As an English teacher, I am depressed to read that an author's having access to a sophisticated vocabulary is a drawback. Yet Shirley Hazzard's novel is an old-fashioned book--despite her elliptical style--for though the book is slender, the characters are fully rendered, and the theme of the novel--the absurdity and necessity of having a personal life in light of the destructive forces of war and politics--comes through clean and clear. There is so much mean-spiritedness in some of the reviews that it is difficult to know what to address first. Ben and Helen are old beyond their ages, first, because they read deeply and widely; second, because of the coldness of their family which has made it necessary for them to turn inward to books and to each other; and, third, because Ben is dying (look up the age at which Keats was writing his wonderful poetry or a biography of Sylvia Plath). Apparently, too, not one of the negative reviewers has ever actually been in love. One suspects that they took resumes from prospective mates! This story is also particularly poignant as a reminder of the cost of war.

I think reviewers and critics often miss the role taste plays in our evaluations of books. What I would like to see, in reading as in life, is a touch more humility before discouraging someone else from reading a book. I can't imagine that everyone associated with the Book Critics Circle is illiterate, despite the accusations of some of Amazon's reviewers. I thought Hazard's novel a beautifully written, fully realized novel and was disappointed to come to the end of it. However, I must confess that often, I don't get Borges. Does that make those that find his work valuable wrong? Is my denseness Borges' fault or my own?

Unfortunately, many of the reviewers remind me of (a few of) my eighteen-year-old students--oh, the weight of so much critical accumen and the wonder of being an age at which everyone is "stupid" except, perhaps, oneself. I'm sorry some of the readers were disappointed. Perhaps they should stick with the classics, and thereby not have to feel diminished by reading (gasp!) a love story (despite the number of love stories in classical literature, it is some comfort to read what is already vetted) or with the quick reads that do not demand much of the reader. There is nothing wrong with either approach to reading, only with trashing what one has not taken the time to understand or perhaps does not have an affinity for.

No, this is not the Da Vinci Code. Or John Grisham's The Firm. But here's the good news: I enjoyed both the Da Vinci Code and The Firm, and I loved The Great Fire. You don't need to be a snob to enjoy this book. It's a great story with great characters. But you're more likely to enjoy it if you really love writing (not just a good story, but also how language is used to get the story across). It is true that you will be challenged at times. When I started reading the book, I had the feeling that I didn't really know what was going on or who was who--Hazzard's style is not very linear. But in time everything starts making perfect sense, and you can't help being fascinated by the extraordinary command of the English prose that Hazzard has. With one sentence she can convey a place, a time, a feeling, an emotion in a way that you'll think you're there and it's happening to you. I believe she's one of the most talented writers I have ever encountered, and I've read a lot. I recommend this book to anyone who truly loves both great fiction and the English language.