The book follows Caro into middle age, through devotion and betrayal, penury and prosperity, love and loss, until the final detonation of a long-held secret brings both startling enlightenment and catastrophe.īy nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation. Gifted and beautiful, poor but willful, she spurns the lifelong love of astronomer Ted Tice, preferring the dangerous and adulterous attentions of Paul Ivory, a playwright. Caro, the elder sister and the novel’s main protagonist, is a different kind of woman. On their arrival as young women in Britain, mild gentle Grace quickly marries and settles into an apparently uneventful marriage with Christian Thrale, a self-satisfied man of means. Orphaned while young by their parents’ deaths in a Sydney harbour ferry sinking, the sisters have been raised by their older half-sister Dora. Most often described as a novel about love, The Transit of Venus is the story of two Australian sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, who emigrate to England in the 1950s. For it seems to me that in The Transit of Venus, a significant aspect of her artistic motive is to set up a sense of certainty – and then destroy it, capsizing the reader over and over again. While the context is different – she was referring to Greene’s antagonistic personality – this rug-pulling aptly describes the disruptive nature of The Transit of Venus’s narrative and Hazzard’s literary technique. In her memoir Greene on Capri (2000), Hazzard writes that Graham Greene ‘regularly invited you to step on a rug, which he would then pull out from under’. It is as if the book itself gives off a kind of anti-magnetic field at first, holding the readers off until they are ready to face up to the questions it asks of them. It is a curious thing, this need to return. Even Hazzard’s husband Francis Steegmuller remarked that nobody should ever have to read this book for the first time. Michelle de Kretser, Geoff Dyer and Michael Gorra have all written of their early resistance to the book, only to have returned to it later and been shocked by its brilliance. It has been fascinating to observe, in other writers’ responses, how often they remark on seeing its greatness only on a second visit – often decades after first buying or reading it. I still don’t fully understand The Transit of Venus, which I suspect is why I will keep returning to it throughout my life. I wanted to be there, in some way, for Shirley Hazzard. Why I felt I had to be there I am not certain, but it was something to do with the kind of cosmic heft I felt on finishing the novel. My presence at the observatory that day was, in some opaque way, an act of homage to Hazzard’s book. For the rest of the day, throughout the six and a half hours of the transit, I kept returning to watch it on my computer screen, the tiny dot valiantly making its way across the sun’s vast boiling surface, a small boat in an orange sea. As the black dot made contact, I found myself in tears. The chances of seeing a perfect transit are rare, unrepeatable I knew I had to be there that day. Venus transits appear in pairs, each pair a hundred years apart, and 2012 was the second transit this century. A tiny bead, making contact, slowly traversing the face of the sun.īefore then, I had not been more than passingly interested in astronomical matters, but I had recently read Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus (1980), and been struck by it in ways I didn’t fully understand. We watched, and waited more, and finally cheered when a small black dot appeared against the sun’s bright expanse. We huddled in coats and scarves, peering into telescopes, waiting and waiting. In June 2012, I stood on a balcony at the Sydney Observatory at seven in the morning, to watch this century’s final Transit of Venus.
0 kommentar(er)
