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A Novel Worth the Wait
A Review by Adrienne Miller

It's been over two decades since the publication of Shirley Hazzard's last novel, the acclaimed The Transit of Venus. And what a relief: The Great Fire is a work of painstaking artfulness, every bit the masterpiece that The Transit of Venus was. The characters here — anguished, stricken, capable of grace — are real flesh-and-blood people, and I can think of no greater compliment to pay a novelist. It's two years after the end of WWII, and the setting is Japan (with stops in Hong Kong and China). Peter Exley and Aldred Leith are "best friends" (although Leith detests that "schooldays" term). Both fought in the war, and both are, to varying degrees, haunted by it. Exley is now, in 1947, a prosecutor of war criminals. Leith is thirty-two ("[h]e did not consider himself young"), the son of a loveless novelist father ("[t]he father who had famously written about love—love of self, of places, of women and its men—was renowned for a private detachment"); he has arrived in Japan to do research for a book. In a wrecked town near Hiroshima, Leith meets the improbably intense, sensitive, and literary siblings Helen and Benedict Driscoll. Benedict (Ben) is twenty, and is dying from something called Friedreich's Ataxia. Helen, with whom Leith falls in love, is three years younger than Ben. In its intelligence, its fluent prose, its brilliant characterizations, and its thrumming narrative pulse, The Great Fire is that rarest of accomplishments: a novel that rises above itself.

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