The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 13 September 2005
by Shirley Hazzard
It is 1947, and Japan has so far endured two years of a foreign occupation after World War II. Aldred Lieth is a British soldier who has just spent the past year walking through China, which is in the throes of its own civil war (which will end up bringing Mao and the Communists to power). Aldred has come to Japan to gather further information on the nature and destructiveness of war, in pursuit of a book he is writing on the subject. He arrives on the outskirts of Hiroshima and the first man he meets dies while telling him about the people with whom Aldred is due to set up residence. Indeed, this somber opening presages the tone of the entire book. Hardly a chapter goes by without a death occurring on- or off-stage here, with war, accidents and illness pervading the lives Hazzard brings to these pages. The postwar preoccupation with death turns all the characters somber, and their clipped speech, along with Hazzard's clipped prose, make this book a challenging and emotionally downbeat read. The similarly somber tone so pervades the characters, that they often feel too similar to one another, and the book becomes almost a fairytale of forboding.
Anyway, Aldred meets a young beautiful seventeen-year-old girl, Helen Driscoll, where he finds his bunk in Japan. Soon, a poetic love develops between them, in the sickroom atmosphere of Helen's terminally ill brother, and in the devastated landscape of Hiroshima. Still, Hazzard describes a broad realm of love and loss, life and death, and the heavy aftermath of war. She takes the time to critique the cultural stiffness of Australia and New Zealand. She creates a Graham Green-type character in Aldred's famous writer father. (Much of the book reflects Hazzard's own biography.) She introduces characters and kills them off. Other deaths happen far away. All this death casts its spell upon the book, and to some extent the reader. The writing is not beautiful, but it is oddly unique. It is a voice from a time and a place perhaps less familiar to modern readers. An oddly compelling, but dark book. Still, coming through all this death, Aldred and Helen might find a glimmer of hope in their love.
(For this novel, Hazzard was awarded the 2003 National Book Award for fiction.)