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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11737.The_Great_Fire?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="The Great Fire" border="0" src="http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11737.The_Great_Fire?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">The Great Fire</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7486.Shirley_Hazzard">Shirley Hazzard</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/20022815?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 2 of 5 stars "The Transit of Venus" eventually won me over, despite occasional frustration with Shirely Hazzard's mannered and oblique style. But there were relatively few rewards for plodding through this disappointing effort. Hazzard's account of the romance between war veteran Aldred Leith and 17-year old Helen Driscoll spans a large canvas, both geographically and historically - the action unfolds from Hiroshima and Hong Kong to London and Wellington, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, still a time of great political and personal instability.
 
 This choice of backdrop for the central love story suggests a certain ambition on Hazzard's part - this is not meant to be just your average star-crossed love story. No, this is about love in tumultuous times, and the romance of Aldred and Helen is presented as more portentous somehow because it unfolds in a world which has been ripped apart and 
 is still stumbling towards a new order.
 
 I wish I could say that Hazzard had been successful. Certainly, the book garnered more than its share of critical acclaim ("hypnotic", "brilliant", "stunning", "dazzling" say Ann Patchett, Joan Didion, while Anita Shreve is moved to such excesses as "transcendent", "sublime", and "touching infinity"). These are not the adjectives I would have chosen to describe what is, charitably viewed, nothing more than a slightly better written version of "The Bridges of Madison County". By which I mean that Hazzard is skilled enough to avoid the kind of hilarious linguistic atrocities that were littered throughout Waller's book. 
 
 Does she have anything more interesting to say than Waller? Not really. Aldred and Helen are possibly two of the dullest protagonists you’ll ever come across. Implausibly noble and sensitive, they are cast straight from the same phoney mold as Francesca and Robert over there in Madison County. Which makes "The Great Fire" a love story that is impossible to take seriously, despite Hazzard's bombastic efforts to convince us that Aldred and Helen are cut from some kind of super-special cloth. 
 
 They are endlessly fascinating to each other, of course, and the reader is obviously meant to find them charming as all get out. To this end, Hazzard makes a point of reminding us on every other page that 
 (a) they read books and discuss art and big profound ideas 
 (b) Aldred is brave and noble 
 (c) Helen is wise beyond her years, 
 while further stacking the deck by surrounding them with an assortment of cartoonishly yobbish, nasty, colonial caricatures of vulgar insensitivity. 
 Oh, and yes -- Helen comes equipped with a delicate, saintly, terminally ill, sagelike, older brother, who dies obligingly on cue, while Aldred has a neurotic, ineffectual wartime friend Peter, to underscore his own manly, heroic nobility and general sensitive warrior qualities. 
 
 Aldred and Helen. Two of the noblest, most sensitive, caring, protagonists you could ever hope to meet. And two of the most boring.
 
 Personally, I've never been a fan of hagiography. There's nothing like the odd weakness or character flaw to add depth and keep the reader interested. Give me the sodden moral ambiguity of one of Graham Green's whisky priests, or the cool amorality of Tom Ripley, over the nobility and sensitivity of Aldred Leith any day. 
 
 Readers looking to Hazzard for insights into the postwar milieu of South East Asia during the collapse of colonialism will also be disappointed. Other than some generalized hand-wringing about the horrors of war, she has little of interest to add. An omission that is particularly disappointing when one recalls Paul Scott's extraordinarily nuanced and sensitive account (The Raj Quartet) of events in India on the eve of its independence. By contrast, Hazzard's commentary on postwar developments in Asia seems superficial and uninformed.
 
 Despite its rapturous critical reception, "The Great Fire" seemed entirely pedestrian to me, peopled with characters that remained oddly two-dimensional and consequently unaffecting. I had more fun reading "Skye O' Malley", the bodice-ripper featuring Ireland's legendary voluptuous Elizabethan pirate.
 
 But the world is wide, and somewhere Aldred and Helen are living nobly, sensitively, happily, ever after, reading BOOKS and discussing big, profound ideas while the dignified family retainer serves them sherry in the library, cosily insulated from the common plebeian hordes of people like you and me that roam the earth in our vulgar, clodhopping fashion. Probably right down the road from Francesca and Robert, and Howard Roark. You all are imagining them in a villa in Tuscany somewhere. I'm betting that they end up in a gated community for snooty protagonists with attitude, in one of those creepy, radioactively glowing, houses created by that spiritual soulmate of Waller and (on the basis of this overwrought effort) Hazzard, Thomas Kinkade, the infamous "Painter of Light".
 
 Shirley Hazzard: a writer who becomes less interesting, the more of her work you read.
 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/166376?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

David's review
rating:
bookshelves: read-in-2008

"The Transit of Venus" eventually won me over, despite occasional frustration with Shirely Hazzard's mannered and oblique style. But there were relatively few rewards for plodding through this disappointing effort. Hazzard's account of the romance between war veteran Aldred Leith and 17-year old Helen Driscoll spans a large canvas, both geographically and historically - the action unfolds from Hiroshima and Hong Kong to London and Wellington, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, still a time of great political and personal instability.

This choice of backdrop for the central love story suggests a certain ambition on Hazzard's part - this is not meant to be just your average star-crossed love story. No, this is about love in tumultuous times, and the romance of Aldred and Helen is presented as more portentous somehow because it unfolds in a world which has been ripped apart and
is still stumbling towards a new order.

I wish I could say that Hazzard had been suc...more

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