The Great Fire

Hazzard sends Aldred Leith to occupied Japan in 1947 to document the aftermath of the incendiary raids that gutted Tokyo in a single night, the most destructive bombing raid of the war, and the title's fire refuses to stay contained to that assignment. It migrates to Leith's own history, a decorated infantry command in Europe, an unfinished book, a father he has never managed to love easily, and finally to Helen Driscoll, the seventeen-year-old he falls for inside the compound where her father runs an occupation post. The two fires, the one that leveled cities and the one that levels a thirty-two-year-old man's careful self-possession, are meant to sit on the same page and force a comparison the characters around them mostly refuse to make.

That refusal belongs chiefly to the Driscolls, whose scandal at their daughter's attachment to an older man reads, next to their near-indifference to their son Ben's decline, as a thoroughly inverted moral scale. Ben, dying slowly of an inherited nerve disease, is the household's most alert intelligence and its least protected member, and his parents manage his illness the way they manage the furniture while reserving their real outrage for Helen wanting something of her own. An empire that has just finished incinerating civilian cities in the name of necessity still finds ample energy left over to police a girl's heart.

Peter Exley, Leith's friend prosecuting war crimes out of Hong Kong, supplies the counter-example. He has trained himself, through tribunal work and a string of declined attachments, into a careful paralysis: expert at documenting other men's atrocities, incapable of risking exposure of his own. Leith's willingness to want Helen openly, against advice and against his own history of guarded engagements, is what the novel ultimately holds up as the harder, more honest use of a life spent surviving a war.

Kure, where Leith is billeted, is Allied Japan reduced to a garrison town: mess dinners, postings gossip, a hierarchy of rank reproduced among the civilians attached to it. Hazzard keeps the physical evidence of the firebombing and the atomic attack at the edges of the frame, glimpsed rather than toured, because her real subject is what happens to the occupiers rather than a survey of the suffering they have been sent to administer. The compound's manners, its dinner parties and reputations, read as almost willfully small against what surrounds them, and that smallness is the point: catastrophe on this scale does not automatically produce proportionate people.