Fiction: Passion, rage, fear and at times, a chilling detachment tend to shape the tone of war literature. This sixth novel, and the first in some 20 years, by the veteran Australian, Shirley Hazzard, is a most unusual book about the legacy of conflict, the world that is left after a battle has ended.
In The Great Fire, she observes several characters as they not so much attempt to reach a level of understanding about their experiences, as simply carry on with ruined bodies and ruined lives.
Initially it appears this is the story of Aldred Leith, a distinguished soldier. At 32, "he did not consider himself young. Like others of his generation, had perhaps never quite done so, being born into knowledge of the Great War". He is still searching for resolution. Much of this search concerns his father, a famous writer and by all accounts, a vain, selfish individual with a history of pleasing himself.
Sitting in a train, Aldred considers the author photograph of his father on the jacket of his new book. "The father who had famously written about love - love of self, of places, of women and men - was renowned for a private detachment." As further evidence of a coldness that borders on the ruthless, it is soon revealed that Leith senior even helped himself to his son's first serious lover.
Hazzard's approach to her narrative is at first sharp, strongly descriptive and rather cryptic. Leith's long train journey through Japan ends at a military camp. But first he is met at the rail station by a young Australian soldier, who though slightly in awe of the important visitor is candid enough about life at camp. "Can't complain. Not much to do when you knock off, except booze. No girls, not that you'd want. Too many people doing things for us, and then we're not let out that much. Lots of idleness in this occupation game."
His supposedly conversational remarks are typical of Hazzard's style. This is a wise, comfortably traditional novel in which many points about war and life are made. It has all the weight if little of the cynicism of experience. Instead, it has the feel of a life's experience, of thoughtful observation and of memory; feelings remembered, gestures recalled. Ultimately it is a romance - yet against the background of what is a straight-forward, bluntly conventional love story, are the several stories of a group of individuals all affected by greater events than ordinary choices.
As a quiet, honourable hero of sorts, Aldred Leith is convincing. Life has subdued him, but then, he was subdued before he went to war. Initially, it seems his relationship with his father will dominate the book. But it doesn't. Far stronger is Lieth's outsider status. His "sole familiar was the heavy canvas bag that, resting by his feet as he sat on the bed, took on, with its worn and weighted fellowship, the speckled contour of an old dog; barrel-bodied, obedient."
It is curious that although most of the characters are sympathetic and convincing - seldom easy to achieve without being sentimental - the strongest impressions created by this novel are of places and moods, groups of loud foreigners juxtaposed with defeated Japanese. She captures moments in time, scenes that happened and are here recalled.
"Long and narrow, the lounge had possibly been a dormitory. Furnished now by a scattering of vermilion chairs in false leather, and by an improvised bar, on trestles at the far end of the room, where a score of servicemen and a dozen nurses stood talking and laughing and flirting under a canopy of tobacco smoke; dropping ash from fingers and spilling drink from paper cups. The table was ranged with bottles and scattered with dropped nuts and flaked potatoes. The men were, in varying degrees, drunk. The younger women had unrolled their regulation hair for the evening . . . That was the scene, for those who might later recall it, on a spring night of 1947 on the island of Ita Jima in the Inland Sea of Japan."
Another stylistic feature of the book is the way in which Hazzard allows her characters to brief each other, in a way that appears natural considering the slightly unreal situation of soldiers continuing to occupy a place after a war has ended. It is as if the plot unfolds through a series of conversations.
Through such a conversation with the wonderful and dying Professor Gardiner, Leith first hears of Driscoll, a medical administrator. "They're not liked, Driscoll and his wife. Driscoll's an angry man. Hurt you know, unsure. Drinks a good bit, blusters. Offensive. People don't like it, of course. Visitors are sent there, distinguished visitors, that sort of thing. Not so much Americans, Americans have their base at Kure, and all Japan to play in. British, rather, like yourself, or Australians like the Driscolls. It's Hiroshima that draws them. They come to inspect the sites, spend a few days, sleep up there in the hills. Damp, I can tell you." More information follows and Leith is left wondering "at this dwelling on irrelevant Driscolls".
As early as page 17, it is clear that the Driscolls, Benedict, their ailing son, and particularly, his sister, Helen, will be very important. The girl is unusual to the point of being idealised and the romance that develops has tinges of romantic fiction, but it is neither the entire story, nor the entire novel.
Far more compelling is the sense of dislocation, and the chance comments from any number of characters, all of whom walk, not drift, through the book, and through life itself. It is a brusquely elegiac novel with flashes of E.M.Forester. One character remarks: "To have been on earth, merely, during the first World War, is to have experienced Hades. Afterwards, everywhere, the climate of mourning".
Later Aurora, Leith's former mistress, the woman taken from him by his novelist father, announces of Aldred's Helen: "No one has a right to look like that". In relaying this comment to his beloved, Leith amends it to "When I showed her your photograph, she said that no one had the right to be so beautiful." Touches such as this render Hazzard's quiet, thoughtful, near period novel with its sense of daily lives enduring in spite of difficult histories. The Great Fire is unusually and convincingly layered, textured and atmospheric.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times.
The Great Fire, By Shirley Hazzard. Virago, 314pp, £15.99