Revaluation

For a long time I have been hoping to run a series of revaluations devoted to classic books, chiefly novels, in the Sewanee Review. I have endeavored without success to secure succinct reinterpretations of The Secret Agent and Brideshead Revisited among other enduring works. Sooner or later (later it appears) I will be successful. For now I will consider one of my favorite novels, Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus (1980), which I have recently reread. One test of a classic is that it bears rereading. Wallace Fowlie told me that he had read Proust's great work over forty times, and I think he did so each time with the expectation that he would find something new, something more to relish and admire.

My rereading of Miss Hazzard's dazzling novel, her best, has left me with the unsated desire to read it again, and indeed I have reread long sequences in mulling over this piece. In general I reread few books, even my favorites; but I confess to having read The Horse's Mouth at least four times and to contemplating that same rewarding experience once more. I will not be readdressing the other novels in Joyce Cary's first trilogy.

Shirley Hazzard has gotten relatively little critical attention for her fiction, which includes the novel The Great Fire (2003); a selection of stories, The Cliffs of Fall (1963); and two superb short novels, The Evening of the Holiday (1966) and The Bay of Noon (1970). She is also a first-rate critic and memoirist, as her account of Graham Greene on Capri (2000) amply demonstrates. Let me declare that she is a better writer of fiction than her old friend Greene at his best, a wonderful maker of fiction long and short.

Miss Hazzard is a native of Australia who soon after World War ii served in Hong Kong and Wellington for the English government before moving to New York City to work for the United Nations for a decade. After her years at the un she married the distinguished translator Francis Steegmuller (who died in 1994). She has traveled widely and has written memorably about the Far East, England, Italy, and New York as well as Australia and Capri. In Australia her writing has been neglected, but she has lived far longer in New York than in Sydney, where she was born and educated. Her deracination, so to speak, may be a principal reason she has not gotten her proper share of honors as a brilliant writer. Honors, yes, but an insufficient measure in terms of her vast accomplishment.

Were I teaching the modern British novel, I would begin with James; proceed to Joyce, Conrad, and Ford; consider Waugh and Cary and then J. G. Farrell and John Banville. I might assign a novel by Greene; I would not assign anything by such highly touted contemporary writers as Ian McEwan. Patrick White, another great writer from Australia, would be included, of course. The last novel considered would be The Transit of Venus.

It is sentence by sentence a work of original and glittering style. Nearly any period yields its share of surprise and delight. "Memory is more than one bargains for. . . . This sense of past . . . can turn even the happiest memories to griefs," the protagonist observes. Memory of what? Love, of course. The controlling theme of the novel is love in all its manifestations and guises, especially in the lives of Caroline and Grace Bell, sisters orphaned by their parents who drown in a wrecked ferry.

Grace has an ordinary life as the wife of a dull bureaucrat who is briefly unfaithful to her; at one point soon thereafter she nearly has an affair with an engaging young physician. "The bare facts of Grace Thrale's love, if enumerated, would have appeared familiar, pitiful, and—to some—even comical." As her abortive affair is haltingly getting underway, her conversation with the doctor at a party is interrupted by an obtuse friend who presents "news" of the sinking of the Tirpitz, the great German battleship. There...