Chinese crackers and damp squibs

Clare Colvin The Great Fire By Shirley Hazzard

Oddly enough, for a novel set mainly in the Far East, the cover of The Great Fire shows Turner's painting of fire over the Thames - which, combined with the title, puts you in mind of the Great Fire of London. Misleading, but this is a historical novel of sorts, set in Japan and Hong Kong of 1947, after the destruction of Hiroshima.

The protagonist, Aldred Leith, is a brave, be-medalled soldier doing a postwar mopping-up job and searching for a peacetime role. He is entranced by a slightly fey brother and sister, Benedict and Helen, children of an uncouth Australian diplomat. The brother is dying of an incurable illness, and his sister's tender devotion inspires in Leith admiration and then love, despite the fact that at 15, she is less than half his age.

As Leith becomes involved with this unlikely pair, his former wartime colleague, Peter Exley, is also, less successfully, trying to find a new role in Hong Kong. His need for affection is unanswered by the women he meets: "He seemed to have dribbled away a lot of feeling in a kind of running sensibility, like a bad cold."

Shirley Hazzard, who was born in Australia, the child of diplomats, lived in Hong Kong after the war and was involved in monitoring the civil war in China, so she knows whereof she writes. She has seen the "great clots of tubercular spittle, shot with blood" on the pavements, and seen the lavish social events of the taipans. She can conjure up that era, with its tensions and uncertainties that followed the triumph of victory.

Despite the authentic background, there is a stilted quality about the novel. The characters of the men refuse to spring to three-dimensional life. Leith, whose father is a famous novelist, talks like a literary academic ("About large subjects there can be many kinds of books, playing on our sympathies or alienating them. Truth can be a synthesis, or an impression"). Hazzard also ignores tried and tested rules of fiction, such as "Show, don't tell". A great deal of telling goes on, and filling-in on the back story. The author has chosen an alienating name for her hero, so much so that Leith feels obliged to explain why he was lumbered with "Aldred".

I wish I could have liked this book, for I remember Hazzard's joyful memoir of Graham Greene in Capri. It is also good to find an author who doesn't feel obliged to churn out novels like a fast-food outlet, but can afford to wait 20 years (after her highly-praised The Transit of Venus). In this case, though, the interval seems to have led to a certain creakiness of technique and a dry academic style.

Would it have been better written as a memoir of life in the Far East? Possibly, but it might have been harder to deal with the great issues Hazzard is concerned with: the transitoriness of life, the arbitrariness of fate. And there are perceptive sketches of the minor characters: Aldred's uneasy homecoming to his mother in Norfolk, Peter's relationship with the emotionally blank but dutiful Miss Xavier. It's just that the novel never catches fire, which, in view of the title, is a pity.

Clare Colvin's 'The Mirror Makers' is published by Hutchinson