Forehead full, full crop of longish white hair. Features fine and lined, light eyes, one eyelid drooping. In an enactment of momentary interruption, the man was half-turned to the camera, left elbow on blotter, right hand splayed over knee. It was one of those pictures, the author at his desk. Aldred Leith was holding a book in his right hand-not reading, but looking at a likeness of his father on the back cover. Meanwhile, he was examining a photograph of his father. 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. Leith sat by a window, his body submissively chugging as they got under way. Before the train had moved at all, the platform faces receded into the expression of those who remain. From a megaphone, announcements were incomprehensible in American and Japanese. There were thuds, hoots, whistles, and the shrieks of late arrivals. Finality ran through the train, an exhalation. To be published in October, 2003 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. The young people capture Leith's sympathy indeed, he finds himself struggling with his attraction to this girl whose feelings are as intense as his own and from whom he will soon be fatefully parted.Ī deeply observed story of love and separation, of disillusion and recovered humanity, The Great Fire marks the much-awaited return to fiction of an author whose novel The Transit of Venus won the National Book Critics Circle Award and, twenty years after its publication, is considered a modern classic.Excerpt from The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard. Precocious, brilliant, sensitive, at home in the books they read together, these two have been, in Leith's words, delivered by literature. Helen, still younger, is inseparable from her brother. Benedict, at twenty, is doomed by a rare degenerative disease. Now in their thirties, with their youth behind them and their world in ruins, both must invent the future and retrieve a private humanity.Īrriving in Occupied Japan to record the effects of the bomb at Hiroshima, Leith meets Benedict and Helen Driscoll, the Australian son and daughter of a tyrannical medical administrator.
The men have maintained long-distance friendship in a postwar loneliness that haunts them both, and which has swallowed Exley whole. Both men have narrowly escaped death in battle, and Leith saved Exley's life. Peter Exley, another veteran and an art historian by training, is prosecuting war crimes committed by the Japanese.
Son of a famed and sexually ruthless novelist, Leith begins to resist his own self-sufficiency, nurtured by war. In its wake, Aldred Leith, an acclaimed hero of the conflict, has spent two years in China at work on an account of world-transforming change there. The great fire of the Second World War has convulsed Europe and Asia.
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