The Transit of Venus

Caroline and Grace Bell are orphaned sisters from Australia who come to England in the 1950s. Grace marries Christian Thrale, a civil servant, and settles into a comfortable, diminishing life. Caro, the harder and more intelligent of the two, is loved from their first meeting by Ted Tice, a young astronomer of unshakable decency, and chooses instead the playwright Paul Ivory. Ted goes on loving her for thirty years. That is the visible plot, and Hazzard follows it from postwar England to New York across a novel of some 340 pages.

The book is famous for how it is told. Hazzard writes in a distanced, authoritative narrative voice of a kind the critic Michael Gorra has said would have seemed old fashioned even in 1980, with characters firmly rooted in social circumstance, and then undercuts that classic form with shifting perspectives and a habit of telling you things sideways. The last pages are so elliptical, Gorra admitted, that on his first reading he missed them entirely, and his advice stands: pay attention to the most inconsequential details, and be prepared to read it again. It is a book that all but asks to be read twice.

Its social landscape, Gorra wrote, will be familiar to any reader of Lessing or Murdoch or Drabble, and yet it is not an English novel; Hazzard has the keenest of eyes for the nuances of class and nothing of her own at stake in getting them down. That outsider's coolness, together with what he called an eye like an awl and a willingness to reach for grandeur, is the pleasure of the book. Best for patient readers who like their love stories severe, and who do not mind being tested.