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The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

 

Rating: (Recommended)

 

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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 London fire ended the plague and launched the Restoration. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 5 which opens part 2 (pp. 57-60):

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 MacGregor Road, in the officers' quarters, while a sceptical soldier searched through papers for his name. While the soldier riffled coloured pages. Peter Exley looked down the green mountain to the town scribbled along the shore: noting the cathedral, the post office, the governor's villa; and the bank, which was higher than all these. It was much as he had supposed. Beyond the narrow harbour and the shipping there were small bleached mountains at the verge of Asia.

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 MacGregor Road, no record of his request. It would have been quiet up there and relatively cool; just below the fog line—damp, of course, with the green smell that Exley at first mistook for freshness and soon recognised as decay. But there had been a mistake and every room was taken.

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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The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the February 2004 issue of Executive Times

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