The Great Fire

From The New Yorker: Hazzard is nothing if not discriminating. Hierarchies of feeling, perception, and taste abound in her writing, and this novel-her first in more than twenty years-takes on the very notion of what it means to be civilized. The fire of the title refers primarily to the atomic bombing of Japan, but also to the possibility of transcendent passion in its aftermath. In 1947, a thirty-two-year-old English war hero visiting Hiroshima during the occupation finds himself billeted in a compound overseen by a boorish Australian brigadier and his scheming wife. He is immediately enchanted, however, by the couple's children-a brilliant, sickly young man and his adoring sister-who prove to be prisoners in a different sort of conflict. In the ensuing love story, Hazzard's moral refinement occasionally veers toward preciosity, but such lapses are counterbalanced by her bracing conviction that we either build or destroy the world we want to live in with our every word and gesture. Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker