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Loading... The Great Fire (original 2003; edition 2004)by Shirley Hazzard
Work detailsThe Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard (2003)
Although I loved 'Transit of Venus', and still love Hazzard's language, she didn't quite know what to do with herself here. There are more loose ends than a yarn factory, and endless painfully flatlined passages. After awhile, it's hard to pay attention because you know that she's not going to USE these characters, settings, ideas. She's just moving through them, as if she were a passenger on a worldwide train. It has a listless feeling, except where the plot bursts out, (one always feels) against her will. (  ) idyll | Apr 9, 2013 |  (2003 review) The Great Fire is so called to suggest upheavals on both a personal and national level, I think. It’s a phrase that comes up four or five times. I don’t know why Philip Adams likes this book so much. It tells the story of Peter Leith, some wealthy man in the army looking at how vanquished people cope although most of the book is about his love for Helen, a seventeen year old (he’s 33). It’s all very English, down to all the disparaging comments about the ‘Antipodes’ and the indulgence of Leith’s love for Helen and vice versa which we are presumably meant to see as a great love story but which to me seems too precious to be anything that affects me. Perhaps some of artificiality of the story is the way it’s set around 1948 when people obviously approached life differently but I find Hazzard’s generalizations, conveyed through the mouth of Leith, to be complacent and inaccurate. (  ) evening | May 18, 2012 | Irritating protagonist, book saved by glorious prose, but not a great read overall. ( ) celerydog | Feb 29, 2012 | Shirley Hazzard and her late husband were friends with Graham Greene, and I can see shades of the latter's work in The Great Fire. I don't mean to suggest Hazzard's style is derivative, merely that she shares his talent for describing characters thrown into chaotic situations overseas. For me the scenes of foreign people and places were more interesting than Leith's unconsummated love affair; I wanted more of them. I liked the writing very much though, and I will return to this author. (  )1  whirled | Oct 3, 2010 | The Great Fire is the story of Aldred Leith, a soldier sent to study the after effects of the bombing of Hiroshima. He connects with other British and Australian citizens during his time in Asia, notably with the teenaged Helen, with whom he falls in love. I didn't like the main character, Aldred. He was snobbish, too perfect and, to be honest, not that interesting. He might have been interesting if he'd been written in a more realistic way. His love, Helen, was also written as too perfect to be interesting. In all, this was too much like a Harlequin romance plot for my liking, with the young heroine devoted to her dying brother, the true and, for a long time, chaste love..often from afar and the moody atmosphere of post-war Asia. The writing was lyrical, the plot well executed (if you like that kind of story) but the characters were too weak to hold the book together. (  ) LynnB | Mar 6, 2010 |
 What makes The Great Fire such a special novel is the lush and palpable desire present in so many of its pages, desire not just for physical consummation but for human connection and hope, made all the more meaningful by the backdrop of the cruelty and violence of war.
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0312423586, Paperback)More than twenty years after the classic The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard returns to fiction with a novel that in the words of Ann Patchett "is brilliant and dazzling..." The Great Fire is an extraordinary love story set in the immediate aftermath of the great conflagration of the Second World War. 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 fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center 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 story of love in the aftermath of war by "purely and simply, one of the greatest writers working in English today." (Michael Cunningham) The Great Fire is the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 04 Jan 2013 08:09:18 -0500) In the aftermath of World War II, young men and women living in Europe and Asia reconstruct their lives, including a soldier who learns that material goods and success are not enough, and a woman in Japan who tends to her dying brother. (summary from another edition) |
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