Her fiction aims to do the precise work of defining shifting psychological states, while sweeping the reader up into something larger even than the particulars of the story it's telling. The literary epochs she invokes are not adopted styles but her natural forebears. There's nothing academic, nothing of the pastiche in Hazzard's approach. "The Great Fire" feels as if it comes to us from another time - really, other times - because Hazzard combines emotion on a scale we associate with 19th century novels with language that has the freedom and lucid precision of early 20th century modernism.
Not because it comes 23 years after Hazzard's last novel, "The Transit of Venus," and not because its setting, Occupied Japan two years after the end of World War II, belongs to the distant past (it doesn't). Shirley Hazzard's "The Great Fire" is a novel out of time.
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