The Great Fire

Occupied Japan, 1947. Aldred Leith is thirty two, a British officer decorated in the war and the son of a famous novelist, and he has come east to write a book about the countries the fighting left behind. At an Allied post he meets the two Driscoll children: Helen, who is seventeen, and her brother Ben, who is ill and will not recover. Both of them read constantly, and Leith, after years among ruins and soldiers, finds in their company something close to peace. He falls in love with Helen and she with him, and Hazzard neither excuses the distance between their ages nor lets it be the only obstacle. The Driscolls are moved on, and the novel travels beyond Japan to Hong Kong, to England and to New Zealand. Running alongside is the story of Peter Exley, Leith's friend, an Australian who wanted to be an art historian and instead sits in Hong Kong taking depositions on Japanese war crimes while his own life waits.

The pleasure here is at the level of the sentence. Hazzard writes short, weighted, slightly formal prose and tells you almost nothing outright: people arrive in the middle of a conversation, connections are established by allusion, and you are expected to keep up. That makes the opening stretch genuinely demanding, and readers who want a plot to pull them forward often stall there. The reward is that ordinary moments carry an unusual charge once the pattern comes clear, and the final movement gathers real speed. It suits anyone who reads for prose, who wants a novel about the years just after a war rather than the fighting itself, and who does not mind a love story the book asks you to take at its own valuation. Readers still disagree about whether that romance earns its ending.