The Great Fire Shirley Hazzard 2003

Dustjacket synopsis:
"Twenty years in the writing, The Great Fire is a triumphant novel of lives shadowed by war and redeemed by love.

"After the Second World War, in war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women must reinvent their lives and learn, from their past to dream again."

Quotes:
"Purely and simply, she is one of the greatest writers working in English today" - Michael Cunningham
"I wish there were a set of words like 'brilliant' and 'dazzling' that we had saved for the rarest occasions, so that when I tell you The Great Fire is brilliant and sazzling you would know it is the absolute truth. This is a book worth a twenty-year wait" - Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto
"An hypnotic novel that unfolds like a dream: Japan, Southeast Asia, the end of one war and the beginning of another, the colonial order gone and at the centre of it all, a love story" - Joan Didion
"A brilliant, brave and sublimely written novel...among the most transcendent works I've ever had the pleasure of reading" - Anita Shreve

First Paragraph

Now they were starting. Finality ran through the train, an exhalation. There were thuds, hoots, whistles, and the shrieks of late arrivals. From a megaphone announcements were incomprehensible in American and Japanese. Before the train had moved at all, the platform faces receded into the expression of those who remain.

Aldred Leith sat by a window, his body submissively chugging as they got under way. He would presently see that rain continued to fall on the charred suburbs of Tokyo, raising, even within the train, a spectral odour of cinders. Meanwhile, he was examining a photograph of his father. Leith was holding a book in his right hand - not reading, but looking at a likeness of his father on the back cover.

It was one of those pictures, the author at his desk. In an enactment of momentary interruption, the man was half-turned to the camera, left elbow on blotter, right hand splayed over knee. Features fine and lined, light eyes, one eyelid drooping. A taut mouth. Forehead full, full crop of longish white hair. The torso broad but spare; the clothes unaffected, old and good. As a boy, Leith had wondered how his father could always have good clothes so seldom renewed - a seeming impossibility, like having a perpetual two days' growth of beard.

From the Virago paperback edition, 2003.

Notes:
This novel was the winner of the USA National Book Award in 2003, and the 2004 Miles Franklin Award.

This page and its contents are copyright © 2005 by Perry Middlemiss, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Last modified: January 15, 2005.