As much as we may enjoy the pot-boilers and penny-dreadfuls we pick up to keep us company on the beach or on the bus, the pleasures they afford always pale when placed next to the real thing: literature. Literature, we are reminded upon encountering a novel such as Shirley Hazzard's "The Great Fire," affects us in ways that the beach-reads -- as much fun as they are -- never can. Take, for example, the first paragraph of Hazzard's book: "Now they were starting. Finality ran though the train, an exhalation. There were thuds, hoots, whistles, and the shrieks of late arrivals. From a megaphone, announcements were incomprehensible in American and Japanese. Before the train had moved at all, the platform faces receded into the expression of those who remain."
Hazzard arranges the words and images in a manner striking enough to compel us to notice this mundane moment -- a train about to leave the platform -- and we do so with eyes entirely fresh. In a lesser novel this station scene would be, if not excluded altogether, rushed through on the way to more important things.
Hazzard's plot offering is also far from impoverished. Her story -- a 32-year-old Englishman, a decorated veteran, goes to Japan in 1947, falls in love with a 16-year-old girl and surmounts various difficulties to be with her -- works as a frame over which she, with her glorious prose, weaves a tapestry of ideas, places and people. And this skillfully woven tapestry is compelling enough to keep us turning pages as feverishly as we would with a plot-driven novel. We do so, however, not so much because we are eager to know what will happen next, but rather because we are eager to view the next vista that Hazzard's art will reveal.