The Transit Of Venus (Virago Modern Classics)

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Reading The Transit of Venusone could not fail to notice the quality of the writing. The novel’s plot is skilfully managed and the tension is held to the final chapter. Some of the sentences are beautifully constructed. Look at what she wrote about Grace’s reaction to the departure of her would-be lover quoted above. And as I typed Caro’s reflections I noted the provisionality of the sentences: ‘not clear now’, ‘not quite certain’, ‘might have missed the point’. It’s tempting to refer to this style as nineteenth century, but that’s not it. One can hear in the passage quoted above a note—several notes, in fact—that are distinctly more modern, not least the incredulous dismay that concludes it. Hazzard’s aphoristic intelligence goes full tilt here. Her simple descriptive powers are no less lethal:

With these prospects and impressions, Grace Marian Thrale, forty-three years old, stood silent in a hotel doorway, with the roar of existence in her ears. And like any great poet or tragic sovereign of antiquity, cried on her Creator and wondered how long she must remain on such an earth. (289) This is a book that treats its characters with tenderness, as though to mitigate the pain that will be inflicted upon them by time. She works in an office, subjected to the taken-for-granted sexism of the time. She is very hurt by the end of her affair with Paul but eventually marries an American benefactor and goes to live in NY. Christian Thrale has an affair because he believes he should. Grace falls in love with her son’s doctor, but he refused to compromise her. The marriage is not made better or worse by these episodes. Ted Tice goes on loving Caro from a distance until two important secrets are revealed. As an example of what Shirley Hazzard does so astonishingly well, in the middle of a horrid, stilted dinner party, the narrator reveals a secret wound in Christian’s mother, Charmian Thrale, with a parenthetical:The pleasure this writing affords — its plushness, patient description, etherizing beauty — does not stem from its closeness to life, however. The pleasure Hazzard wants to convey is novelistic and bound up in the act and fact of reading. Hence her love for coincidences, for tellingly significant names (of course, anyone named Hazzard must be granted lenience on this score), for referring to characters by their full names, for patterns. The transit of Venus occurs in pairs; the novel is full of them — two sisters, two ill sons, even two significant watches and two umbrellas. The desire to label Hazzard as a writer concerned with “intimacy” is strange; she relishes handling her characters as characters, drawing our attention to the way she marches them across the chessboard, repeatedly depicting them as looking out of or being seen through windows, as if to remind us that we too are seeing them through a frame. Caro’s life has also contained much hurt and loss. She had not remained a spectator, but engaged with the experiences life sent her with dignity, reflection and generosity. Hazzard also published five nonfiction books through her career, including two books critical of the United Nations (Defeat of an Ideal, 1973, and Countenance of Truth, 1990), a collection of essays about Italy co-written with her husband Francis Steegmuller (The Ancient Shore, 2008), a collection of the Boyer lectures she gave in 1984 (Coming of Age in Australia), and a memoir detailing her friendship with the author Graham Greene, titled Greene on Capri (2000). It was not clear now, as formerly, that Grace was satisfied with chintz and china – with Christian saying, “A wee bit fibrous,” or hoisting his trousers at evening and announcing, “Must get my eight hours.” It was not quite certain Grace had remained a spectator. Those who had seen her as Caro’s alter ego might have missed the point. (324)

Shirley Hazzard was born in Australia and died in 2016 in New York. She had spent time in the Far East after the war, before being employed by the UN from 1951. She was posted for a while to Naples, and developed a love of Italy. My Transit has a happy ending,” she said. “The stage is littered with bodies, but it is a happy ending.”Within her sentences the choice of words, especially adverbs and adjectives, add complexity, depth and nuance to the novel. She writes on a wide canvas: across several decades and across the globe: Australia, Britain and New York as well as parts of Europe and South America. It has been described as an unbearably sad book, but I felt moved by it, as if the experience of reading it had added to my own life. In part this is because of her ‘huge charity towards the people’ (Kirkus Review 1980).

Joint managing director of Hazzard’s Australian publisher Hachette, Justin Ractliffe, said the company was “deeply saddened” by the news. “Shirley was a giant talent who produced a small, but perfectly formed, body of work. She continues to be beloved in Australia as well as around the world and will be missed by the many readers moved by her extraordinary writing.” Dora sat on the corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it. […] Dora was not one to lie down under the news that a veranda was called a loggia, or a mural a fresco. Let alone villa for house. (45) And yet her sharp ear for conversation, and eye for the defining political moment in a social interaction, makes her a novelist well suited for our times when novels about personal autonomy in the context of larger political systems are so popular. Readers are coming to see that Hazzard wrote about her own lifetime as a cosmopolitan and professional woman and simply published late. If her work initially seems dated, it may be because The Transit of Venus was published in 1980, when she personally was an unfashionable middle-aged woman who appeared to leave fussiness and drawing rooms in her wake. Two Australian sisters have come to Britain in the 50s and are staying in a house of an eminent astronomer, Professor Thrale. Grace is the younger, very pretty, engaged to the son, Christian. Caroline is older and with more purpose in life. There is a third sister, a half-sister Dora who is an eternal victim who has cared for Caroline and Grace since their parents died. We follow Grace and Caro through several decades, and mostly Caro because Grace leads a calm and largely unexplored life.Perhaps you have felt uplifted by this novel and are only surprised that I mention it. Or perhaps you have yet to experience one of Shirley Hazzard’s novels, in which case you have a great treat in store for you. Once I got to know her—it would take a few years—I’d understand that this “remoteness” was not geographical but temporal. Everything that seemed to constitute Shirley, everything that mattered, was also a piece of the historical past. But just then what I felt was surprise—something akin to what an astronomer might’ve experienced (to borrow a figure from one of her own books) upon receiving a signal from another star. Proof of life.