Unities and proprieties.(Books)(The Great Fire)(Book Review)

The Great Fire, by Shirley Hazzard; Virago, 2002, $28.

ALDRED (an easy first name to mis-spell) Leith, a thirty-two-year-old British Army major who "did not consider himself young" in the spring of 1947, is posted to Kure, in Japan, to study the aftermath of the bombing in Hiroshima. He is billeted in an "establishment" presided over by a Brigadier Driscoll, a coarse, ill-tempered man attached to the Australian army occupation force who later turns out, in a subtle twist of characterisation by the author, to be a New Zealander by birth.

Subtlety is the foremost element in this suavely written and understated novel. Driscoll, for all his vulgarity, is the father of two remarkable teenaged children, who fascinate Leith from his first vision of "a hand at rest ... extended on the tabletop, where it lay in silence". The hand belongs to Helen Driscoll, but before Leith sees her face he has been impressed by the intelligence, wit and erudition of her brother Benedict, who is afflicted with a never-specified fatal wasting illness. While Benedict is frail and, for much of the time, bedridden, Helen is "striking", at first, for her "well-being": "It was as if, in this child, Benedict had been re-created in radiant health, the hair made glossy, the skin vital, the form sound."

Benedict, and his illness, perform an important structural task for this novel, as he encourages Leith to recount his background and emotional history in what becomes a series of flashback-like scenes. Leith is no ordinary soldier. He is the son of a best-selling author, Oliver Leith, whose works are so popular that they appear among the kit of army drivers; and he is himself the author of an account of a journey through wartime China. He has been married and divorced, and has had other love affairs, one of them with a woman who then became his father's mistress.

Thus the time-span encompassed by the novel is greater than it might notionally be, given the quite specific dates at the beginning and end of its narrative. ...