The next day, Leith, so recent an acquaintance, is his only mourner.īilleted in a military compound, Leith reports to Brigadier Barry Driscoll, a belligerent Australian, and his wife, Melba, who has her own style of ferocity. Gardiner, due for repatriation to Britain, dies that same night. The two men talk about the disruptions war has brought to private life and the near-impossibility of renewing love. A frail prison camp survivor, Gardiner, offers a ‘bone china claw’ to shake hands. Images of death confront Leith from the moment he arrives in Japan. At their best, the victors are patronising about anything Asian at their worst, they take self -aggrandising pleasure in humiliating the vanquished.

He observes with growing distaste the psychological distortions that follow the Allied victory. Having lived in Hong Kong as a child and later travelled widely in China, Leith has broader sympathies than most of his colleagues. Restless, estranged from his parents, divorced and uncertain of his future in civilian life, he welcomes an assignment that will deepen his knowledge of Asia. It explores the human response to war and destruction, with the great fire of Hiroshima the immediate cause of the novel’s journeys among maimed people and damaged places in 1947.Īldred Leith, a thirty-two-year-old British officer with a heroic war record, is sent to Japan to write his impressions of war’s aftermath in the area devastated by the atom bomb. Like the earlier novel, The Great Fire is ambitious in theme and intricately structured.

The Great Fire comes twenty-three years after Hazzard’s brilliantly composed, witty, and ultimately tragic work The Transit of Venus. Turner’s famous painting, The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, is the evocative cover image for Shirley Hazzard’s long-awaited novel.

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The great fire novel by shirley hazzard