The only great thing about "The Great Fire" is its name. She sustains the tension until virtually the last page. I guess the troubling aspect of this narrative is that you begin to fear for Helen and allow in a hope she finds someone else which is odd because the author has set up her relationship with Aldred as one of those once in a lifetime great loves and Aldred is likeable. Suddenly, it's not looking so good for Helen who has been taken to New Zealand while her beloved dying brother has been removed to America. We discover he is a bit of a cad with a history of failed relationships including a very brief marriage. There are lots of stories within stories in this novel and occasionally the narrative shifts to other characters from Aldred's past. Her narrow minded military father disapproves of Aldred. The girl Helen is beautiful and Aldred falls in love with her despite her young age (17). The boy Ben is dying of an incurable illness. In Japan he meets a young Australian brother and sister. I forget exactly what his job was but he's still in the army and was decorated during the war for bravery. It begins in Japan in 1947 where Aldred Leith is about to visit Hiroshima. The backdrop is the devastation caused by WW2. And it's also a poignantly romantic book. The young people capture Leith's sympathy indeed, he finds himself struggling with his attraction to this girl whose feelings are as intense as his own and from whom he will soon be fatefully parted.įirst thing to say is what a stunningly beautifully written book this is. Precocious, brilliant, sensitive, at home in the books they read together, these two have been, in Leith's words, delivered by literature. Helen, still younger, is inseparable from her brother. Benedict, at twenty, is doomed by a rare degenerative disease. Now in their thirties, with their youth behind them and their world in ruins, both must invent the future and retrieve a private humanity.Īrriving in Occupied Japan to record the effects of the bomb at Hiroshima, Leith meets Benedict and Helen Driscoll, the Australian son and daughter of a tyrannical medical administrator. The men have maintained long-distance friendship in a postwar loneliness that haunts them both, and which has swallowed Exley whole. Both men have narrowly escaped death in battle, and Leith saved Exley's life. Peter Exley, another veteran and an art historian by training, is prosecuting war crimes committed by the Japanese. Son of a famed and sexually ruthless novelist, Leith begins to resist his own self-sufficiency, nurtured by war. In its wake, Aldred Leith, an acclaimed hero of the conflict, has spent two years in China at work on an account of world-transforming change there.
The great fire of the Second World War has convulsed Europe and Asia.
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