Hazzard, Shirley. The Great Fire. New York: Picador, 2004. Print. “...faces receded into the expression of those who remain.” (1) “All this time, Leith’s body had been gathering speed.” (5) “Body went on ahead; thought hung back.” (5) “Having looked a while at Asia...” (5) — nice understatement. “He had, himself, some fame, quite unlike his father’s and quite unsought.” (7) “How do you manage here?” The man had a deep, low voice. If one had to put a colour to it, it would have been dark blue; or what people in costly shops call burgundy.” (8) “...the drear and dented interior that, in military matters, passed for home.” “The helmsman said, “Minesweeping.” He added a comment that blew away, so that the soldier heard only “Weeping.” (10) “...at the discomfiture of an enemy, or a friend...” (10) “They glanced at the new arrival climbing among them, and women noted a durable man.” (11) —This is from Aldred’s perspective? “Long and narrow, the lounge had possibly been a dormitory. Furnished now by a scattering of vermilion chairs in false leather, and by an improvised bar, on trestles at the far end of the room, where a score of servicemen and a dozen nurses stood talking and laughing and flirting under a canopy of tobacco smoke; dropping ash from fingers and spilling drink from paper cups. The table was ranged with bottles and scattered with dropped nuts and flaked potatoes. The men were in varying degrees, drunk. The younger women had unrolled their regulation hair for the evening. Some of the were pretty, and had exchanged their uniforms for coloured dresses; and wore, on slim wrists the linked bracelets of gunmetal, black and gilt, improvised by Japanese streets of ruined cities. Two or three of the girls trilled and twirled to imaginary music while a soldier, who knelt at their feet, was setting up a gramophone from a ganglion of wires.” (14) —Nice motion to this description “Decent people, but the place is laconic. Surprised by peace.” (16) “...a fatality older than love.” (21) “No one else really knew who he was. It was another war death, deferred.” Side effects, after-effects. This time yesterday I hadn’t met him Today he’s dead and I’m his only mourner.” (23) “Brigadier Driscoll was coming from the pond. In youth an athlete Driscoll continued to hold himself in past tension, barreled against every challenge. Wet and near naked, his body was corded by evidence of past exploits, muscles and sinews pushing up through tissue, as roots of an old tree might displace a pavement—the impression confirmed by a trunkish neck, seared by pale creases. ON head, chest, limbs, the curled hair was grey.” (26) “His theme—of loss and disruption—was pervasive now throughout the world. With the sombre choice, there had come much happiness in far communities. There had been the singular, transcendent encounters.” (35) “With his back to the raw cottages and unsightly common room, Leith again remembered Ginger who had sad, Quite beautiful. It was true: the place itself, had it be de-Driscolled, was a paradise. But that, of course, applied to all the world.” (36) “Yet some tenderness passed between them, in reaction to the horror of the morning. The entire world, he thought needs comforting.” (44) “He watched, as it seemed a facing wall: the flimsy wall of the room in which he might well die.” (45) “It was new to him to speak this way with a child. But then, a girl of perhaps fifteen—who knows history and says “magisterial”—a girl already embarked on her secret biological life, has taken leave of childhood. He had looked discreetly as men and boys will do with girls, for the slight shape of her breasts in the pretty dress.” (46) “Filth was in fact on Peter Exley’s mind in those first weeks: the accretion filming the Orient, the shimmer of sweat or excrement. A railing or handle on’es fingers would not willingly grasp; walls and objects grimed with existence; the limp, siled colonial money, little notes curled and withered, like shavings from some discoloured central lode. Ammoniac reek, or worse, in paved alleys and under stuccoed arcades. Shaved heads of children, blotched with sores; grey polls of infants lolling from the swag that bound them to their mother’s back. And the great clots and blogs of tubercular spittle shot with blood, unavoidable underfoot; what Rysom called :poached eggs.” In such uncleanness nothing could appear innocent not the infants themselves or even diseased chow dogs roaming the Chinese streets, or scrawny chickens pecking at street dirt.” (73) “Lust, if htere was energy for it, must be consummated in a lather of sweat. And it was the same thing, no doubt, with love.” (74) ...driblets of rust... (76) “No, of course, I too wish to do so. There is cruelty beyond even that of battle. YOu look the man in the eye, then coolly kill him. YOu drop a bomb and dissociate yourself from the consequences. Is it murder or is it war? Is war in any case murder? That is what your commission pretends to decide.” (78) “If Westerners had contributed shades of expression to the human face, Peter wondered, were they to be praised or blamed? Was responsiveness in itself something to be proud of?” (81) “A laughing, quicksilver girl, with high breasts and sun-streaked hair.” (95) “‘If I’d done it she’d be alive.’ He said, in a voice they had not heard.” (101) “The girl thought, How close we are, this instant.” (101) —POV switch “The monument to the Great Fire. It was worth it, though, at the top.” (108) “...but not to violate the immediate pleasure....” At table, Leith sat on the right of Lady Grantham, whose conversation was dispensed in iron rations.” (113) “But how, he wondered, entering and taking up a book and even breathing it in to sustain remembrance, could one ever verify or explode the myth, except by drowning.” (115) Aged eleven, at a friend’s house after school, lolling on a back verandah amid the smells of banked lantana and baked eucalyptus, he flipped pages of the friend’s album of secret pictures turned up in a toolshed trunk. There were coloured plates, full pages, torn raggedly from magazines or cut painfully from good books There were undraped women, reclining, and men with them; and a good deal of pale flesh. Somethign was wrong; nothing was furtive or complicit. He said, “These are paintings.” He flet they had been presumptuous.” (119) —Clear Light of Day done right. “Pattie becoming nebulous, evaporated.” (121) “But it’s like the phenomenon of suicide in all our lives—the wonder is that more don’t commit it.” (133) “The city appeared to sway on it’s own silt.” (141) “A panic-stricken ribaldry passed off as virility , authenticity. Passed off as truth.” (141) “Rysom folded his arms under his head. A huge yawn made a grotto of his face, stalactites of stained teeth.” (143) “Neither of these things would happen” (148) What? “He was not the first man to wonder, Is she the plaything, or am I.” (151) “He sat down, took her left hand, which was nearest, and released it. That morning, in a past life, he’d imagined saying, “And how have you been, by dear?”—something of the benevolent and neutral kind. And now did say exactly that which came forth to them as the most exalted question in all the articulate world.” (154) —tension, imagination, and the unspoken “...just the age of the century...” (158) “Her life, and even his, in the little prison of their rooms, had also rounded and ripened, grown luminous.” (161) “‘...to pass time, I worked on the land there, hard work, and I liked it and liked the men of the place more or less my age, with whom I reaped and dug ditches and dandled muck.’ And in the evening cleaned up, and went in the village looking for girls. ‘ The ploughing was done with horses...” (177) The things left unsaid in every one of Aldred’s conversations are the most important, the most thorough reflection. “How often one cold be both moved and bored at the same time.” (186) “ When people were spontaneous, Peter Exley was ready to love them.” (191) Having expected, repeatedly, to die from the great fires into which his times had pitched him, he had discovered a desire to live completely; by which he meant, with her.” (195) Receiving the box of old things. (198) “I must get used to gladness.” (201) “...small necessary fires...” (203) [Use of the word You?] (pg. 202-4) ...anesthetized smile... (205) ...improvised from remnants of materials... (205) “The human frame was often, to Peter Exley, in commensurate with all it must evince and bear.” (206) “I know.” The doctor got up. “I’ll look in on you again.” The hand on Exley’s shoulder. (229)—Nice technique of using fragments to pointilize a picture of the scene. “His own experience was not great, yet had filled up his thought at the expense of other powers. His consciousness was like haf-excavated ancient cities he had seen—incapable of future, expecting only a further accretion of the past.” (230) “A solitary water ice, pale pink, was carried past him on a silver tray. An ice so delicately insubstantial so smoothly chastely pink, so exactly flush with its silver rim, that he recalled it for years as an emblem of re-entry.” (238)—Strange POV She brought tea and toast, which he ate near an old coke stove that was opaquely, pinkly burning. He sat in a cane-bottomed chair that had come, he thought, from Italy. From time to time, the heavy door, which led onto the grassed yard, swung back on a draught of cold, damp, delicious early air, letting in some younger person whom he did not recognise but who nodded to him with curiosity before going about business elsewhere. There was a hiss of broth and onion from the stove, an odour of smouldering coke, and an age-old drift of humidity from worn flagstone, wrung0out dishcloths, and a rack of tea towels drying overhead. There were his mingled sensations of estrangement and belonging, which for the time being conferred exemption.” (258)—Sensory fullness “‘Men,’ she said, ‘fell compelled to test their fate; to learn, once and for all, who is master. The lesson is not always to their liking.’” (276) Omniscient POV (281) “...the public words stood in the air like skywriting...” (297) Tense shift between 308-313 “Even in California, I still hear the slurping sound that is a world licking its wounds.” (319) “Everything, other than his imagination trailed in slow motion around the globe.” (321)