The silence after war

War is hell, but victory is lonelier. Vietnam vets were the first to be diagnosed with "post-traumatic stress," but Hemingway described the disaffection after battle almost half a century before in "The Sun Also Rises." Warriors have had trouble returning home since the The Odyssey.

Add Shirley Hazzard's new novel to the shelf of haunting post-war stories. "The Great Fire" smolders in the aftermath of World War II, when the ashes of that calamity threatened to flash back into flame or choke estranged survivors.

It's been 23 years since her previous novel, "The Transit of Venus," won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The careful poetry of "The Great Fire" suggests that perfectionism rather than writer's block consumed those two decades. In fact, the hiatus seems to have extracted Hazzard from the movement of contemporary literature and enabled her to produce a strikingly timeless novel with an aura of aged profundity.

Her story comes into focus two years after the destruction of Hiroshima. The war is over, but the peace is hardly satisfying, leaving a world grimy, lame, and troubled by rumors of resuming conflict. "In the wake of so much death," she writes, "the necessity to assemble life became both urgent and oppressive."

One of the many victors challenged by that necessity is Aldred Leith, a 32-year-old war hero, who's been wandering through the new peace like a man inspecting a burned cathedral. "I feel pursued," he tells a friend, "by evocations of wartime violence, unexorcised." Divorced from a war bride he never really knew and distant from his reserved parents, Leith comes to Japan to record the obliteration of an ancient culture.

"He had spoken with many persons grieved and embittered by ruin, and by the gross ambiguities of their liberation; and related these matters with simplicity and truth." Though we read almost none of Leith's report, Hazzard's narrative is steeped in gorgeous, tragic visions of Asia after the war along with the most careful parsing of Leith's uneasiness about playing conqueror amid the ashes of Hiroshima.

As a decorated soldier in the British army with a publishing assignment from a French general, he enjoys a rare kind of autonomy in this territory now firmly controlled by America. Autonomy, though, is a quality he's had enough of. "As war was ending, he had intended to create for himself a fixed point, some centre from which departures might be made," but two years later he is still "at an immense distance from anything resembling home."

Surprisingly, he finds refuge as a lodger on an island off the mainland where he stays during his observations. His hosts, a brusque Australian administrator and his bitter wife, "were disquieting as a symptom of new power," Leith thinks wryly. Living with them "did not even seem a cessation of hostilities."

Page: 1 | 2