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The
Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Losses Shirley
Hazzard’s last novel, The Transit of Venus, won the National Book Critics Circle Award
in 1981. Her long awaited new work, The Great
Fire, has arrived and it can be a captivating book for many readers. Two World
War II survivors and a young women who has suffered
troubles beyond her years struggle with memories and losses. In a deliberate and lyrical way, Hazzard reveals how a shortage of love can drain away
life. The cleansing fires of the war provide an opportunity to rebuild lives,
in the same way that the great In Harbour on the first
morning, Exley saw the pastel villas on the mountainside,
here and there among vegetation: looted, unroofed, their marzipan interiors
lined with rot; some of them rebuilding under bamboo scaffolding. Looking out
from shipboard, he realised that from those airy
slopes there would be a grand view over the straits to the mainland.
Obviously, the place to be. That same noon he stood by windows up at He was aware of some consequential element that
he had not identified. And with indifference realised
it was beauty. There was no place for him at Redirected to the barracks, he went down
unsurprised on the cable car in the afternoon heat. The July air was a
blanket, summer weight. The barracks looked like Scutari.
Presenting himself, he was led along a creaking verandah and up a soiled
stair. Everywhere, the breath of mould. A corporal unlocked the door. There was a second,
inner door, slatted and latched. Pledges of another presence were distributed
about the room. At the centre of things, marooned on wooden floor, a tin box
was stencilled with name and number. The better
bed, by the window, was heaped with dirty laundry and overhung by a dingy
clump of mosquito net. There was the quiescent menace of a gramophone. "Can't I get a room to myself, at least?" "Put you down, sir, soons
we got one. Bit of a wait, I'd say." There was a fair-sized garrison in
the colony—Buffs, Inniskillings, Ghurkas. In any event, no one would offer preference to Exley, who had no flair for attracting favours. The corporal told him the mess hours. Exley asked, "Is there something like a library
here?" "Any books get left,
they put em on a shelf near the stairs. Mostly
duds, I'd say." It was 19471 mid-July.
His pocket diary said "Saint Swithin." Exley took off his tunic and sat on the inferior bunk.
His shirt stuck like a khaki skin. Overhead, there was the croak of a slow,
ineffectual fan. Rails of light, red as electric elements, striped the
shutters. Walls were distempered sallow. There were marks where heads had
greasily rested, where furniture and kit had been stored, where hands had
sweated around knobs and switches. There were smudges of squashed insects,
with adhering particles. Damp had got at the quicksilver of a long mirror on
a mahogany stand. On the wall by the other bed, pinups were pinkly askew and
lettered signs carried insults, facetiously obscene. Gloom without coolness. The mirror, unreflecting,
was like the draped pelt of some desiccated leopard. There was a century here of obscure imperial
dejection: a room of listless fevers. Of cafard,
ennui, and other French diseases. The encrusted underside of glory. Exley, later, had no clear memory of seeing Roy Rysom for the first time—though sharply recalling that
first sight of Rysom's dented tin box, its stencilled legend WAR GRAVES COMMISSION suggestive of the
decomposing contents. He remembered that he was reading when Rysom came in and set the jazz belting, dragged off his boots,
flopped on his bed, and began twitching to the music. Rysom's
foot in its dank sock stuck out from the military blanket, toes curUng and uncurling erotically to the music; his fingers
convulsively beat on his chest, like hands of the dying. Peter Exley had watched men clutch themselves and die, and be
covered up by regulation blankets. Men shot to bits in the desert, blown in
half by land mines, festered with infected wounds: the whole scarlet mess
covered by the military blanket. Your feets too big. Don't wantcha cause yourfeets too big. Mad at you, cause yourfeets
too big. Hate you, cause yourfeets
too big. Rysom's records were mostly jazz. Life with Rysom was
suffused with noise: the mess boy calling him to the telephone—"Mistah Raisam, Captain Rai-sam." Rysom yelling
for cold beer, as trams rattled in the road below and the dockyard siren
booted or the gun boomed noon. Rysom said it was
funny they should both be Australians, he and Exley,
and on loan to the British Army. He said, "You War Crimes lot," and
booted like the siren. Rysom could introduce
disbelief into anything, unmasking was his vocation. With suspicion he turned
over Exley's Chinese and Japanese textbooks, his
volumes on international law: "A beaut
racket." Spreading a double page of Japanese characters, he uttered a
stream of mad, paralaliac sounds, his comic
rendering of Japanese. Rysom was forever doing imitations: of a language, an
accent, a personality; a man. Rysom had dreams from which he woke shouting: dreams,
like Exley's own, of men dismembered and sheets offlame. Each, in the night, now fought alone the war
that neither could survive. On his cot at the barracks Exley
realised how much of his soldiering had been spent
flat on his back, waiting for war. War had provided a semblance of purpose,
reinforced by danger. Danger had been switched off like a stage light,
leaving the drab scenery. And there they were at the barracks, he and Rysom, two years into peace and bored to death by it.
Each must scratch around now for some kind of compromise and call it destiny. If
you find that you want to take a breath after reading some of these
sentences, The Great
Fire is certainly the book for you. Steve
Hopkins, January 22, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the February 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Great Fire.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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