What do you think?
Rate this book
The Transit of Venus
Caro, gallant and adventurous, is one of two Australian sisters who have come to post-war England to seek their fortunes. Courted long and hopelessly by young scientist, Ted Tice, she is to find that love brings passion, sorrow, betrayal and finally hope. The milder Grace seeks fulfilment in an apparently happy marriage. But as the decades pass and the characters weave in and out of each other's lives, love, death and two slow-burning secrets wait in ambush for them.
352 pages, Paperback
First published March 14, 1980
About the author
Shirley Hazzard
27 books278 followersShirley Hazzard was born in Australia, and as a child travelled the world due to her parents’ diplomatic postings. At age 16, she began working for British Combined Intelligence Services in Hong Kong, monitoring civil war in China. After her family moved to New York City, she worked for several years as a typist at the United Nations Secretariat in New York.
After leaving this post, she became a full-time writer and a passionate opponent of the United Nations, the subject of several of her nonfiction books.
Known for elegant and controlled writing, Hazzard’s works of fiction include five novels. Her last novel, The Great Fire, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
After leaving this post, she became a full-time writer and a passionate opponent of the United Nations, the subject of several of her nonfiction books.
Known for elegant and controlled writing, Hazzard’s works of fiction include five novels. Her last novel, The Great Fire, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 873 reviews
March 11, 2021
Shirley Hazard is without question a first rate wordsmith; she can write beautiful sentences and string them together into an exhilarating music. She does it consistently. But she seems incapable of writing a truly first rate novel. The Great Fire nearly made it but failed ultimately for me because of Hazard’s obfuscating and belittling worship of romantic love. The central relationship in that novel was a fairy story. Hazard is at her best when her characters are figuratively standing beneath a window in the pouring rain. But it’s a sensibility that belongs to a bygone era. And as such can often come across as something sentimental we still feel affection for but have grown out of. It’s as if she needs to do what Fitzgerald did in Gatsby – stand outside his own romanticism, project it elsewhere and see it for what it really is, a sustained act of heightened imagination that ultimately is an illusion.
The Transit of Venus is a novel about affairs of the heart. Many of them illicit; or at least, outside matrimony. Characters are only really alive when the heart is engaged and pumping. It reminded me a lot of Rosamond Lehman’s the Echoing Grove – the theme of two sisters, one rebellious, the other more willing to compromise to the dictates of domesticity and the romantic lyrical nature of the novel’s sensibility. Lehman though did a better job of examining the backstage realms of domesticity without belittling it as Hazard often does. Hazard isn’t interested in her domesticated female until she’s contemplating adultery. She isn’t really interested in anyone unless they’re about to step out into a storm.
As I said there’s much to admire in the writing itself but as a novel some things jarred for me – her attempts to politicise the text for example when one of her triumphs is to transcend era.
The Transit of Venus is a novel about affairs of the heart. Many of them illicit; or at least, outside matrimony. Characters are only really alive when the heart is engaged and pumping. It reminded me a lot of Rosamond Lehman’s the Echoing Grove – the theme of two sisters, one rebellious, the other more willing to compromise to the dictates of domesticity and the romantic lyrical nature of the novel’s sensibility. Lehman though did a better job of examining the backstage realms of domesticity without belittling it as Hazard often does. Hazard isn’t interested in her domesticated female until she’s contemplating adultery. She isn’t really interested in anyone unless they’re about to step out into a storm.
As I said there’s much to admire in the writing itself but as a novel some things jarred for me – her attempts to politicise the text for example when one of her triumphs is to transcend era.
January 20, 2016
This is one of the most perfectly constructed novels that I've ever read. Twice in the opening pages, there are simple sentences that foreshadow all that comes after. All is not revealed until much later, and until that time, you will worry those apparent loose ends as you would an irritating pebble in your shoe, but never fear, Hazzard knows precisely what she's about. And the end, ah, the end. Against all the evidence, even this , I wanted a more conventional ending to this love story. (I was reminded of Villette, another tale of true love that didn't run smooth, when I read and re-read the last pages of Transit of Venus, wanting to put a different gloss on them...and not being able to).
As well constructed as this book is on the macro level of plot and structure, it is also a masterpiece on the sentence level. Hazzard's economic, lapidary style is truly breathtaking. As with The Bay of Noon, there were countless sentences and passages I just wanted to stop, and savor, and puzzle over, and treasure. To give but one example, and one not particularly tied to the plot, a passage succintly describing the upheavals of the sixties begins "In America, a white man had been shot dead in a car, and a black man on a veranda," continues (I'm leaving some sentences out), "In Italy, a population abandoned the fields forever, to make cars or cardigans in factories; and economists called this a miracle," and concludes "England was a dotard, repeating the single anecdote." You could read whole volumes of history that would be less evocative than this spare searing prose.
Or this (which is Hazzard's defense of the entire novel, slipped in early, before you can understand why it is there): "Maybe the element of coincidence is played down in literature because it seems like cheating or can't be made believable. Whereas life itself doesn't have to be fair, or convincing." Why aren't all books crafted like this? (It would take me a lot longer to read them if they were -- this book took me 10 days, about 3 times as long as normal because I didn't want to miss a beat).
As the title suggests, the book is about love -- both transitory love and love as eternal as the planets. While, at the beginning, it may seem to be a more conventional book (or BBC miniseries) about a bunch of attractive young people of different classes shut up in a country house, Hazzard's characters grow up, and her treatment of the loves of middle age, with all the associated losses, disappointment, compromises, and satisfactions, is truly brilliant.
There were times when I found Hazzard's prose a little too elusive -- some of the sentences were puzzled over and still didn't unfold. And once or twice I felt my attention ebbing, but Hazzard always got me back with another beautifully constructed episode. (One of the strengths of this novel is that while the five or so main characters are masterfully realized, the supporting cast is equally well done -- who hasn't known a Dora or a Josie?)
As well constructed as this book is on the macro level of plot and structure, it is also a masterpiece on the sentence level. Hazzard's economic, lapidary style is truly breathtaking. As with The Bay of Noon, there were countless sentences and passages I just wanted to stop, and savor, and puzzle over, and treasure. To give but one example, and one not particularly tied to the plot, a passage succintly describing the upheavals of the sixties begins "In America, a white man had been shot dead in a car, and a black man on a veranda," continues (I'm leaving some sentences out), "In Italy, a population abandoned the fields forever, to make cars or cardigans in factories; and economists called this a miracle," and concludes "England was a dotard, repeating the single anecdote." You could read whole volumes of history that would be less evocative than this spare searing prose.
Or this (which is Hazzard's defense of the entire novel, slipped in early, before you can understand why it is there): "Maybe the element of coincidence is played down in literature because it seems like cheating or can't be made believable. Whereas life itself doesn't have to be fair, or convincing." Why aren't all books crafted like this? (It would take me a lot longer to read them if they were -- this book took me 10 days, about 3 times as long as normal because I didn't want to miss a beat).
As the title suggests, the book is about love -- both transitory love and love as eternal as the planets. While, at the beginning, it may seem to be a more conventional book (or BBC miniseries) about a bunch of attractive young people of different classes shut up in a country house, Hazzard's characters grow up, and her treatment of the loves of middle age, with all the associated losses, disappointment, compromises, and satisfactions, is truly brilliant.
There were times when I found Hazzard's prose a little too elusive -- some of the sentences were puzzled over and still didn't unfold. And once or twice I felt my attention ebbing, but Hazzard always got me back with another beautifully constructed episode. (One of the strengths of this novel is that while the five or so main characters are masterfully realized, the supporting cast is equally well done -- who hasn't known a Dora or a Josie?)
March 16, 2021
The story of the amorous lives of two orphaned Australian sisters who arrive in post-war England. Grace is the more conventional and the better suited to domesticity. Caro is far less easily tamed. She rejects the advances of the nice guy in favour of those of the bad guy. Paul is a successful playwright and about to marry the aristocratic Tertia when he begins his affair with Caro. He's a brilliant character, rotten to the core but compelling in his glamour and intelligence. Ted, Caro's other suitor, has to look on, helpless, but continues to carry the torch for her throughout the novel. A recurring detail in Hazzard's books is that the most dramatic moments happen off-camera so to speak. This is true of both Paul and Ted, both of whom have a secret and in both cases they tell their secret rather than Hazzard showing it.
This is even more beautifully written than her The Great Fire. And she is very wise and insightful about romantic love. I often found her observations exhilarating. Sadly I've now read all her books.
This is even more beautifully written than her The Great Fire. And she is very wise and insightful about romantic love. I often found her observations exhilarating. Sadly I've now read all her books.
September 2, 2024
Damn you, Shirley Hazzard! Why?! I wanted to throw something at someone when I finished reading this. I immediately went right back to the beginning and skimmed my way through the entire novel once again.
“You owe your existence to astronomy, young woman.”
I’ve been meaning to get to this one for a long time. Something about the title always caught my eye. I had to look up the significance of that title, from an astronomy standpoint, because one of the supporting characters in this novel happens to be an astronomer. According to space.com:
“When Venus crosses in front of the sun, astronomers refer to this as a transit. As the planet moves along its orbital path, it will travel across the solar disk, making it appear to observers on Earth as a small black blemish on the face of the sun… Due to the tilt of the planet's orbit, transits of Venus are some of the rarest astronomical sights because they only occur in pairs eight years apart, once every 100 years or so.”
Enough said about that, because if you read this, you’ll want to make your own discoveries of how this might relate to the lives of the characters themselves. The story covers a period of twenty to thirty years in the lives of primarily two orphaned sisters, Grace and Caroline Bell. We become wrapped up in their relationships with their lovers, their spouses, and their joyless half-sister, Dora. The untimely death of their parents, and consequently being raised by the always-morbid, martyred Dora by default, influences and shapes the trajectory of the rest of the sisters’ lives.
“Years were missing, as from amnesia, and the only influential action of her life had been the common one of giving birth. The accidental foundering of her parents had remained larger than any conscious exploit of her own, and was still her only way to cause a stir.”
There’s a lot more than meets the eye in this brilliant novel. Attention to detail is key. And I mean key! Don’t fall asleep while reading this one. There are the cultural differences between Australia and England post-World War II. Differences in class and gender are highlighted in England. Grace and Caroline ultimately seem to represent two different types of women during that time – the married, settled wife of a wealthy husband versus the working class woman. Marriage, unrequited love, and adultery are explored. But Shirley Hazzard is sharp. None of this is sentimental or gratuitous – and not once did she seem to point a finger or shake her head. If anything, Shirley Hazzard would shake her head at missed opportunities. A young doctor, in a scene that left me gutted says:
“Do you not think I see it constantly, the dying who’ve not lived? It is what we are being, not what we are to be. Rather, they are the same thing.”
“… the tragedy is not that love doesn’t last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.”
I’ve been listening to singer/songwriter Dido quite a bit lately, and the song “Chances” has been going through my head all day while I’ve reflected on what the hell to say about this novel that has left me a bit speechless, really. So maybe give a listen to that song. And pay attention to the quotes I’ve shared. They express a lot more eloquence than does the old cliché “life is short.”
“At first, there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you. By the time you realize these are the same, it can be too late for expectations.”
“You owe your existence to astronomy, young woman.”
I’ve been meaning to get to this one for a long time. Something about the title always caught my eye. I had to look up the significance of that title, from an astronomy standpoint, because one of the supporting characters in this novel happens to be an astronomer. According to space.com:
“When Venus crosses in front of the sun, astronomers refer to this as a transit. As the planet moves along its orbital path, it will travel across the solar disk, making it appear to observers on Earth as a small black blemish on the face of the sun… Due to the tilt of the planet's orbit, transits of Venus are some of the rarest astronomical sights because they only occur in pairs eight years apart, once every 100 years or so.”
Enough said about that, because if you read this, you’ll want to make your own discoveries of how this might relate to the lives of the characters themselves. The story covers a period of twenty to thirty years in the lives of primarily two orphaned sisters, Grace and Caroline Bell. We become wrapped up in their relationships with their lovers, their spouses, and their joyless half-sister, Dora. The untimely death of their parents, and consequently being raised by the always-morbid, martyred Dora by default, influences and shapes the trajectory of the rest of the sisters’ lives.
“Years were missing, as from amnesia, and the only influential action of her life had been the common one of giving birth. The accidental foundering of her parents had remained larger than any conscious exploit of her own, and was still her only way to cause a stir.”
There’s a lot more than meets the eye in this brilliant novel. Attention to detail is key. And I mean key! Don’t fall asleep while reading this one. There are the cultural differences between Australia and England post-World War II. Differences in class and gender are highlighted in England. Grace and Caroline ultimately seem to represent two different types of women during that time – the married, settled wife of a wealthy husband versus the working class woman. Marriage, unrequited love, and adultery are explored. But Shirley Hazzard is sharp. None of this is sentimental or gratuitous – and not once did she seem to point a finger or shake her head. If anything, Shirley Hazzard would shake her head at missed opportunities. A young doctor, in a scene that left me gutted says:
“Do you not think I see it constantly, the dying who’ve not lived? It is what we are being, not what we are to be. Rather, they are the same thing.”
“… the tragedy is not that love doesn’t last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.”
I’ve been listening to singer/songwriter Dido quite a bit lately, and the song “Chances” has been going through my head all day while I’ve reflected on what the hell to say about this novel that has left me a bit speechless, really. So maybe give a listen to that song. And pay attention to the quotes I’ve shared. They express a lot more eloquence than does the old cliché “life is short.”
“At first, there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you. By the time you realize these are the same, it can be too late for expectations.”
July 24, 2024
I never heard of Ms Hazzard and I am happy to have discovered her novel. The beginning was hard for me to follow, however, as the novel progressed, I became fully engaged in the story about two sisters, early orhpaned, who leave Australia and arrive in England to seek happiness.
I did not warm up to any of the characters, however, the complex personalitites, motives for their actions and everything life offered them, forced me to listen to the audiobook continually (or nearly). Paul's full story, revealed at the end of the novel, was most memorable to me.
Ms Stevenson, the narrator, reads equisitely, as always, and her voice is a perfect fit for Ms Hazzard's fiction.
*A big thank-you to Spiegel & Grau and NetGalley for a free audiobook in exchange for my honest review.*
I did not warm up to any of the characters, however, the complex personalitites, motives for their actions and everything life offered them, forced me to listen to the audiobook continually (or nearly). Paul's full story, revealed at the end of the novel, was most memorable to me.
Ms Stevenson, the narrator, reads equisitely, as always, and her voice is a perfect fit for Ms Hazzard's fiction.
*A big thank-you to Spiegel & Grau and NetGalley for a free audiobook in exchange for my honest review.*
July 19, 2015
I've dithered for weeks over my rating for this one and finally settled on the five star 'it was amazing' category because yes, it was amazing. But I'm not sure if I actually liked it. It has to be said that I read it under pressure, which is criminal for a Shirley Hazzard. Fine for a plot-led thriller where the only point of interest is how it ends, but a novel by Ms Hazzard should be enjoyed at leisure. You should luxuriate in that exquisitely fine language, linger over the cadence of the sentences and glory in the subtlety of relationships. Unfortunately, none of that was possible for me: it was the choice for my f2f book group, one lady mailed me to say she hadn't been able to get hold of a copy and could she borrow mine? And I hadn't even started it at that point. So I had to get through it in five days. And at the back of my mind I was thinking that my f2f ladies were going to crucify me for suggesting such a book: none of them are native speakers - how on earth would they cope? For it must be said that Ms Hazzard makes you work. Michaela is my lifeline in English class as she's a walking dictionary. When I come up with words like ostensible or plethora yet cannot come up with the German equivalent, Michaela can. And yet even she protested that she had to read this with the novel in one hand and a dictionary in the other. Oh vey!!
Art is the transfiguration of the commonplace, according to Arthur Danto. I had to keep reminding myself of that as I laboured through, thinking that this was too much commonplace, too much transfiguration. Sometimes it felt as though the language was more of a barrier than a medium, and this impression was reinforced by the feeling that every single character in the book had done a rigorous course in discourse analysis, as each and every one of them had an uncanny ability to instantly recognize the subtext beneath each other's comments. There were, admittedly some heart stopping, breathtaking moments, but there was also a lot in the middle where I wondered quite why I should still be interested in a couple of sisters from Sydney. But then, but then. There are several slow ticking bombs that Ms Hazzard surreptitiously plants during the course of the novel. And at the end these explode in a dazzling, heartrending conflagration that throws light backwards on what you have read. Ms Hazzard redeems herself: she writes with authority, while simultaneously allowing you to see how she does it. It ends by being a book about the reading process, a book that reveals to us how we hold those details in mind, ready to combine them together as required and directed by a masterly author. Yes, five stars. Deeply satisfying.
Art is the transfiguration of the commonplace, according to Arthur Danto. I had to keep reminding myself of that as I laboured through, thinking that this was too much commonplace, too much transfiguration. Sometimes it felt as though the language was more of a barrier than a medium, and this impression was reinforced by the feeling that every single character in the book had done a rigorous course in discourse analysis, as each and every one of them had an uncanny ability to instantly recognize the subtext beneath each other's comments. There were, admittedly some heart stopping, breathtaking moments, but there was also a lot in the middle where I wondered quite why I should still be interested in a couple of sisters from Sydney. But then, but then. There are several slow ticking bombs that Ms Hazzard surreptitiously plants during the course of the novel. And at the end these explode in a dazzling, heartrending conflagration that throws light backwards on what you have read. Ms Hazzard redeems herself: she writes with authority, while simultaneously allowing you to see how she does it. It ends by being a book about the reading process, a book that reveals to us how we hold those details in mind, ready to combine them together as required and directed by a masterly author. Yes, five stars. Deeply satisfying.
February 16, 2023
5★
“ ‘You owe your existence to astronomy, young woman.’ Young man, young woman; yet they could not say, old man, old woman. The Professor was preparing to explain, when Caro said, ‘Do you mean, the transit of Venus?’
It was not the first time she had spoiled things.”
Caro and Grace, sisters who came from Australia in the 1950s, are in London, having dinner in the home of the speaker, Professor Sefton Thrale, whose son is courting Grace and is not the snob that his father is.
“He continued as if she had neither spoiled nor spoken. ‘Why did James Cook set sail in H.M.S. Endeavour for undiscovered Australia if not to observe, en route, at Tahiti, the planet Venus as it crossed the face of the sun on the third of June 1769 and thus to determine the distance of earth from sun?’ He was teaching them a lesson.”
I don’t know how the author determined the names of her characters, but Sefton Thrale's suited his objectionable personality.
“Professor Thrale did not much care for the fact that Grace came from Australia. Australia required apologies, and was almost a subject for ribaldry. Australia could only have been mitigated by an unabashed fortune from its newly minted sources—sheep, say, or sheep-dip.”
Sorry, Professor. There are no fortunes for Caroline and Grace Bell, who were orphaned as children and raised, grudgingly and with much complaint by Dora, their older half-sister. To be fair to Dora, the girls never really appreciated the burden they were to Dora. I think she whinged so much that she was seen more as a necessary annoyance, and vice-versa.
”Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it.”
Much later in the story, Dora and Caro are in conversation.
“Dora now wished to go to New Zealand, where she had a friend at Palmerston North. ‘Trish Bootle wants me.’ It was another of Dora's sunderings. ‘I'm wanted there.’
Adam said he would get her passage on the best ship.
‘Anything to be rid of me.’
‘We'll take a return ticket.’
Dora told Dot Cleaver, ‘It's his easy solution, of writing a cheque.’”
This is a slow book to read, not difficult, but so full of observations that caught my imagination and made me stop to think about it.
“A flicker over her stare was the facial equivalent of a shrug.”
“The regularity of suburban streets had been shorn back for a highway: the new road fanned out across a rise, houses splayed back like buttons released over a paunch.”
I have to pause and see that paunch.
Hazzard uses sentences that have gaps and are incomplete, but I know exactly what she means. In the back seat of someone’s vehicle, being shown around,
“It was like riding in state—the jeep being open, and khaki with authority… The officer beside the driver was pointing out, ‘Here there was, apparently there used to be, you wouldn't credit it now.’ He said, ‘I'll fill you in as we go.’”
If you skim, you miss the subtleties, but if you stop to savour them, you find the characters and situations are more real. These are not literary sleights of hand – well, I didn’t read them that way. They seemed like the absolute best way to tell the story.
Something else she does is drop in some reference to an event that will take place far in the future, but at the time you don’t know why, and you will probably forget it anyway. I’ll invent an example.
He was so charming and proper that she was surprised to read about him in the paper thirty years later as being the cause of a scandalous celebrity divorce.
[Remember, I made that up. ]
I’ve not mentioned all the others, the men and women who love, envy, cheat, obsess and orbit around Caro and Grace. Hazzard captures exactly the thrill of illicit, unspoken love and lust in the not-so-young, the conflict between longing for change and the desire for stability.
Across the world, the ties between the men and women tug and loosen from time to time but don’t quite break. It is an engrossing story with an ending that will send you back searching for clues. I’m glad I found them.
“ ‘You owe your existence to astronomy, young woman.’ Young man, young woman; yet they could not say, old man, old woman. The Professor was preparing to explain, when Caro said, ‘Do you mean, the transit of Venus?’
It was not the first time she had spoiled things.”
Caro and Grace, sisters who came from Australia in the 1950s, are in London, having dinner in the home of the speaker, Professor Sefton Thrale, whose son is courting Grace and is not the snob that his father is.
“He continued as if she had neither spoiled nor spoken. ‘Why did James Cook set sail in H.M.S. Endeavour for undiscovered Australia if not to observe, en route, at Tahiti, the planet Venus as it crossed the face of the sun on the third of June 1769 and thus to determine the distance of earth from sun?’ He was teaching them a lesson.”
I don’t know how the author determined the names of her characters, but Sefton Thrale's suited his objectionable personality.
“Professor Thrale did not much care for the fact that Grace came from Australia. Australia required apologies, and was almost a subject for ribaldry. Australia could only have been mitigated by an unabashed fortune from its newly minted sources—sheep, say, or sheep-dip.”
Sorry, Professor. There are no fortunes for Caroline and Grace Bell, who were orphaned as children and raised, grudgingly and with much complaint by Dora, their older half-sister. To be fair to Dora, the girls never really appreciated the burden they were to Dora. I think she whinged so much that she was seen more as a necessary annoyance, and vice-versa.
”Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it.”
Much later in the story, Dora and Caro are in conversation.
“Dora now wished to go to New Zealand, where she had a friend at Palmerston North. ‘Trish Bootle wants me.’ It was another of Dora's sunderings. ‘I'm wanted there.’
Adam said he would get her passage on the best ship.
‘Anything to be rid of me.’
‘We'll take a return ticket.’
Dora told Dot Cleaver, ‘It's his easy solution, of writing a cheque.’”
This is a slow book to read, not difficult, but so full of observations that caught my imagination and made me stop to think about it.
“A flicker over her stare was the facial equivalent of a shrug.”
“The regularity of suburban streets had been shorn back for a highway: the new road fanned out across a rise, houses splayed back like buttons released over a paunch.”
I have to pause and see that paunch.
Hazzard uses sentences that have gaps and are incomplete, but I know exactly what she means. In the back seat of someone’s vehicle, being shown around,
“It was like riding in state—the jeep being open, and khaki with authority… The officer beside the driver was pointing out, ‘Here there was, apparently there used to be, you wouldn't credit it now.’ He said, ‘I'll fill you in as we go.’”
If you skim, you miss the subtleties, but if you stop to savour them, you find the characters and situations are more real. These are not literary sleights of hand – well, I didn’t read them that way. They seemed like the absolute best way to tell the story.
Something else she does is drop in some reference to an event that will take place far in the future, but at the time you don’t know why, and you will probably forget it anyway. I’ll invent an example.
He was so charming and proper that she was surprised to read about him in the paper thirty years later as being the cause of a scandalous celebrity divorce.
[Remember, I made that up. ]
I’ve not mentioned all the others, the men and women who love, envy, cheat, obsess and orbit around Caro and Grace. Hazzard captures exactly the thrill of illicit, unspoken love and lust in the not-so-young, the conflict between longing for change and the desire for stability.
Across the world, the ties between the men and women tug and loosen from time to time but don’t quite break. It is an engrossing story with an ending that will send you back searching for clues. I’m glad I found them.
July 9, 2015
I don’t even know how I felt about this book. Even as I type this I have no idea how I’m going to rate it. At times I thought the writing was brilliant and amazing, and other times I thought it was pretentious and overwrought. No doubt about it, Hazzard’s writing is downright beautiful. She’s a writer’s writer; cerebral, structured, and deliberate. I got the sense the entire time that she was standing over her perfect sentences and elaborate prose with a self-satisfied smirk. Yes, ok, you can write, Shirley, you can write the pants off most authors I’ve read recently, and that would be great if I read only for the words, but I don’t. The thing is, the characters spoke so perfectly and elegantly and with such control, it was as if the whole thing were rehearsed. Everything sounded fancy and lovely and wise, but, I just don’t know…
The main protagonist, Caro, for example, was as dry as day old toast. Her sadness was too subdued for me to connect with. Her married sister Grace appears briefly and sporadically, which was a shame because her marital angst wasn’t fully realized. There was so much unhappiness, infidelity, longing, brooding; it’s a mystery how this book managed to make me feel almost nothing. The characters were far, far away and icy cold, and their sorrows felt remote.
This sounds like I didn’t like the book: I did! It’s great, thought-provoking literature, and I was mostly enthralled. I just can’t shake the feeling that there was an emotional core missing here, and for me emotion is key. While I appreciated and loved the writing, I was too aware of the book’s mechanics to ever let go completely.
This book takes patience and perseverance. The first 80 or so pages were rough and overly cryptic. The whole thing is cryptic, actually, and there are monumental clues scattered throughout that are easy to miss. The ending…Let’s just say, don’t read this when you’re sleepy and/or not concentrating completely.
3.5
The main protagonist, Caro, for example, was as dry as day old toast. Her sadness was too subdued for me to connect with. Her married sister Grace appears briefly and sporadically, which was a shame because her marital angst wasn’t fully realized. There was so much unhappiness, infidelity, longing, brooding; it’s a mystery how this book managed to make me feel almost nothing. The characters were far, far away and icy cold, and their sorrows felt remote.
This sounds like I didn’t like the book: I did! It’s great, thought-provoking literature, and I was mostly enthralled. I just can’t shake the feeling that there was an emotional core missing here, and for me emotion is key. While I appreciated and loved the writing, I was too aware of the book’s mechanics to ever let go completely.
This book takes patience and perseverance. The first 80 or so pages were rough and overly cryptic. The whole thing is cryptic, actually, and there are monumental clues scattered throughout that are easy to miss. The ending…Let’s just say, don’t read this when you’re sleepy and/or not concentrating completely.
3.5
February 12, 2023
'You're in my future. A fortune-teller told me.
Hazzard (in contrast to her surname!) has constructed this with the inexorability of classical tragedy. The opening scene with its catastrophic storm that heralds something unprecedented, narrows down to the sight of a solitary, small figure walking into the landscape - and into this story - like the beginning of a Thomas Hardy novel. And yes, something of Hardy's own tragic vision permeates this book.
But that's just one literary strand that is weaved into the architecture of this book. We also find the 'moral education' theme of, say, George Eliot's Middlemarch that also features two different sisters set against a larger, though local, background; as well as the organising love story of something like Doctor Zhivago along with Pasternak's sense of fatedness.
At times the transit of Venus symbolism becomes a bit laboured as Hazzard uses both the idea of 'transit' as a passage between places, times, from youth to maturity, from life to death, and 'Venus' as an embodiment of eroticised love without much subtlety, and the idea of love as an agent of movement and change underpins the shape of the story.
At the same time, this book also gestures to more modern influences and themes: Woolf's Night and Day which I was coincidentally reading at the same time (or was I destined to experience these books together!) was prominent in its concern with another two young women negotiating the different expectations and oppressions of the twentieth century (and Woolf's Katherine dreams of being an astronomer). There are gestures towards Henry James, too, in the moral imperatives that emerge in Caro's marriage, and traces of the concerns of mid-century women writers in the way clever Caro, despite her top result in the civil service exams, is reduced to lowly typist status and the necessity to make the tea.
The social background is never really more than wallpaper, though, a way to signpost the passing of the years: WW2, Korea, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs. And this is where my engagement with this book never fully cohered: the shifting timescale where years pass in a sentence, the way big moments happen off-stage, the way characters are barely more than silhouettes for much of the time with the cliché of the 'adventurous' sister and the 'passive' one - only Caro also seemed rather passive to me for much of the time - and the way we barely even seen the two women together, made it hard for me to maintain an emotional connection. There are some lovely scenes (Paul and Caro at *that* window), and some powerful writing towards the end .
What really kept me reading is Hazzard's sparky and textured writing style which is dense with allusions and which expects readers to pay attention. That's especially the case with the ending that requires an almost detective-like parsing of clues from throughout the book. It's powerful, that finish, for sure... but ever so slightly manipulative as well?
March 19, 2021
3.5 stars
Many people regard this as a masterpiece, one of the great novels of the twentieth century. It does work on a number of levels and in one sense it is a love story, but there is plenty of unrequited love and unhappy endings. Two Australian sisters (Caroline and Grace Bell) move to England to stay with their ward. There are flashbacks to Australia where they were brought up by their rather difficult sister. Meanwhile Ted Tice is a young astronomer who goes to study with a more eminent one, who happens to be the ward of the two sisters. Ted falls in love with Caroline: she doesn’t fall in love with him. She finds upcoming playwright Paul Ivory more attractive. He is about to marry for money and position> He is amoral, ruthless and essentially the villain of the piece. Ted stays in love with Caroline. Grace is more conventional. This could have become rather sentimental, but manages not to. Be careful with the ending, although it is true to say that the ending is at the beginning as Hazzard does say what happens to the main characters very early on; but it is easy to forget and be deceived by what seems to be a happy ending. This is a bit cryptic, but it’s cleverly wrapped up. The whole is complicated and rather gloomy, no one is really happy and everyone finds the grass greener elsewhere.
Hazzard certainly writes well:
“It was simply that the sky, on a shadeless day, suddenly lowered itself like an awning. Purple silence petrified the limbs of trees and stood crops upright in the fields like hair on end. Whatever there was of fresh white paint sprang out from downs or dunes, or lacerated a roadside with a streak of fencing. This occurred shortly after midday on a summer Monday in the south of England.”
“A man stood on a white porch and looked at the Andes. He was over fifty, white-haired, thin, with a stooping walk that suggested an orthopaedic defect, but in fact derived from beatings received in prison. His appearance was slightly unnatural in other ways—pink, youthful lips and light, light-lashed eyes: an impression, nearly albinic,that his white suit intensified.”
She can do humour as well:
"It was hard to imagine the Major in wooing mood. One suspected he had never courted anything but disaster."
But the whole isn’t comfortable. The most amoral and unscrupulous character is gay. The most decent character is terminally unhappy and their end is tragic. One of Caroline’s friends delivers her verdict on her:
“For her part, Valda considered Caro as a possibility lost. Caro might have done anything, but had preferred the common limbo of sexual love. Whoever said, ‘When you go to women, take your whip’, was on to something deep, and deeply discouraging.”
The quote is, of course, from Nietzsche. And there are comments like this:
“the men with their assertions great and small, the women all submission or dominion”
And
“Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please”
“Even through a telescope, some people see what they choose to see. Just as they do with the unassisted eye.” He said “Nothing supplies the truth except the will for it.”
Love is an illusion, life is sad.
Hazzard writes well and is perceptive, but there is just something that niggled with me, what felt like a rather conventional approach to gender relations, it is always illuminating to look at least likeable characters and see who and what they are. But I would encourage people to read it, I could be wrong about this.
Many people regard this as a masterpiece, one of the great novels of the twentieth century. It does work on a number of levels and in one sense it is a love story, but there is plenty of unrequited love and unhappy endings. Two Australian sisters (Caroline and Grace Bell) move to England to stay with their ward. There are flashbacks to Australia where they were brought up by their rather difficult sister. Meanwhile Ted Tice is a young astronomer who goes to study with a more eminent one, who happens to be the ward of the two sisters. Ted falls in love with Caroline: she doesn’t fall in love with him. She finds upcoming playwright Paul Ivory more attractive. He is about to marry for money and position> He is amoral, ruthless and essentially the villain of the piece. Ted stays in love with Caroline. Grace is more conventional. This could have become rather sentimental, but manages not to. Be careful with the ending, although it is true to say that the ending is at the beginning as Hazzard does say what happens to the main characters very early on; but it is easy to forget and be deceived by what seems to be a happy ending. This is a bit cryptic, but it’s cleverly wrapped up. The whole is complicated and rather gloomy, no one is really happy and everyone finds the grass greener elsewhere.
Hazzard certainly writes well:
“It was simply that the sky, on a shadeless day, suddenly lowered itself like an awning. Purple silence petrified the limbs of trees and stood crops upright in the fields like hair on end. Whatever there was of fresh white paint sprang out from downs or dunes, or lacerated a roadside with a streak of fencing. This occurred shortly after midday on a summer Monday in the south of England.”
“A man stood on a white porch and looked at the Andes. He was over fifty, white-haired, thin, with a stooping walk that suggested an orthopaedic defect, but in fact derived from beatings received in prison. His appearance was slightly unnatural in other ways—pink, youthful lips and light, light-lashed eyes: an impression, nearly albinic,that his white suit intensified.”
She can do humour as well:
"It was hard to imagine the Major in wooing mood. One suspected he had never courted anything but disaster."
But the whole isn’t comfortable. The most amoral and unscrupulous character is gay. The most decent character is terminally unhappy and their end is tragic. One of Caroline’s friends delivers her verdict on her:
“For her part, Valda considered Caro as a possibility lost. Caro might have done anything, but had preferred the common limbo of sexual love. Whoever said, ‘When you go to women, take your whip’, was on to something deep, and deeply discouraging.”
The quote is, of course, from Nietzsche. And there are comments like this:
“the men with their assertions great and small, the women all submission or dominion”
And
“Nothing creates such untruth in you as the wish to please”
“Even through a telescope, some people see what they choose to see. Just as they do with the unassisted eye.” He said “Nothing supplies the truth except the will for it.”
Love is an illusion, life is sad.
Hazzard writes well and is perceptive, but there is just something that niggled with me, what felt like a rather conventional approach to gender relations, it is always illuminating to look at least likeable characters and see who and what they are. But I would encourage people to read it, I could be wrong about this.
February 17, 2016
4 and 1/2 stars, though it is amazing.
An ambitious novel, well-conceived and well-executed. I loved the well-placed foreshadowing (especially one in the beginning that haunts the rest of the book) and the jolts that occur with the fruition of what you might've thought at first were mere throwaway lines.
There were times I felt disengaged, perhaps from the cleverness that at times took me out of the story -- my fault, more than a fault of the work, I'm sure.
If I ever reread this, I think I'd be even more in awe at how the book is constructed, as I'm sure I missed a lot along the way.
An ambitious novel, well-conceived and well-executed. I loved the well-placed foreshadowing (especially one in the beginning that haunts the rest of the book) and the jolts that occur with the fruition of what you might've thought at first were mere throwaway lines.
There were times I felt disengaged, perhaps from the cleverness that at times took me out of the story -- my fault, more than a fault of the work, I'm sure.
If I ever reread this, I think I'd be even more in awe at how the book is constructed, as I'm sure I missed a lot along the way.
August 12, 2024
(Review of the audiobook, Spiegel & Grau, Sept 2024)
Juliet Stevenson's narration of this gorgeous rich novel is fantastic. It's hard for me as a reader to enter this story fully, though, because Shirley Hazzard's novels feel so anachronistic for its time, and that's the way they resonate in my head--as anachronistic. I keep hearing myself thinking "why is Shirley Hazzard trying to write like Thomas Hardy, in a book she first published in 1980?--and I will continue to struggle with this question, when it comes to Hazzard's prose--her deliberate, paradoxical turning-away of any phrasing choice contemporary to her time. Her novel The Great Fire feels exactly the same to me.
Reading The Transit of Venus is, for me, like coming across a great, great practitioner of scrimshaw or tatting or caber tossing. Hazzard is a genius of her strange anachronistic craft. Stevenson's narration is appropriately lush. Despite these true statements, I can't love this audiobook.
Juliet Stevenson's narration of this gorgeous rich novel is fantastic. It's hard for me as a reader to enter this story fully, though, because Shirley Hazzard's novels feel so anachronistic for its time, and that's the way they resonate in my head--as anachronistic. I keep hearing myself thinking "why is Shirley Hazzard trying to write like Thomas Hardy, in a book she first published in 1980?--and I will continue to struggle with this question, when it comes to Hazzard's prose--her deliberate, paradoxical turning-away of any phrasing choice contemporary to her time. Her novel The Great Fire feels exactly the same to me.
Reading The Transit of Venus is, for me, like coming across a great, great practitioner of scrimshaw or tatting or caber tossing. Hazzard is a genius of her strange anachronistic craft. Stevenson's narration is appropriately lush. Despite these true statements, I can't love this audiobook.
September 3, 2024
"At first there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you."
Not sure I can even label or define this book. It is a great read but don't go into it lightly.
I didn't feel quite worthy of this read. I know I missed so much and yet It was so full I couldn't fathom all it was saying even in several sittings (like a delicious over rich dessert I wanted to inhale it but it insisted on being savored not rushed through). As soon as I finished I felt I should start again as I finally began to fully understand and I know I might read it better for that understanding. ( I'm a reader who is always looking for the plot. Where is this story going and am I in for the ride?) In this instance I would say the plot is not the strong point here but only in the usual ways. It has incredible heft in how it describes and shows in language where it is going.
I often felt like I was heading down a road and knew where its likely destination and it did arrive where I thought it would, but the journey was one I never expected.
It is a 5 star difficult read. The language and phrasing take so much thought and there is brilliance that requires focus to fully appreciate. The plot points are subtle and so easily overlooked. (I felt grateful for the characters insights or I might have missed some completely.)
The story is of two sisters, Caro and Grace who arrive in England from Australia just after WWII. It goes on to tell of their lives and loves through the long years ahead. Grace settles in marriage early, Caro is the free spirit, looking more for a life of unconvention. This is the story of their loves, the ones they had and the ones they wanted. There is much here about love and life and how you choose to live and love and how that plays out. Is it possible to have the life you want when what you want changes over time? Life always gets more complicated and decisions accumulate as the years mount. Is it possible a wrong turn took you down a path that only seemed right at the time?
I previously read Hazzard's The Great Fire and loved it--even more on the second reading. I am certain the wonders of this book will shine even more when I am ready to sit down with it again. It was great to do this as a group reading as it added so much. It did remind me of Towles Rules of Civility in many ways with a London rather than NYC setting. If you liked that you will certainly enjoy this.
Not sure I can even label or define this book. It is a great read but don't go into it lightly.
I didn't feel quite worthy of this read. I know I missed so much and yet It was so full I couldn't fathom all it was saying even in several sittings (like a delicious over rich dessert I wanted to inhale it but it insisted on being savored not rushed through). As soon as I finished I felt I should start again as I finally began to fully understand and I know I might read it better for that understanding. ( I'm a reader who is always looking for the plot. Where is this story going and am I in for the ride?) In this instance I would say the plot is not the strong point here but only in the usual ways. It has incredible heft in how it describes and shows in language where it is going.
I often felt like I was heading down a road and knew where its likely destination and it did arrive where I thought it would, but the journey was one I never expected.
It is a 5 star difficult read. The language and phrasing take so much thought and there is brilliance that requires focus to fully appreciate. The plot points are subtle and so easily overlooked. (I felt grateful for the characters insights or I might have missed some completely.)
The story is of two sisters, Caro and Grace who arrive in England from Australia just after WWII. It goes on to tell of their lives and loves through the long years ahead. Grace settles in marriage early, Caro is the free spirit, looking more for a life of unconvention. This is the story of their loves, the ones they had and the ones they wanted. There is much here about love and life and how you choose to live and love and how that plays out. Is it possible to have the life you want when what you want changes over time? Life always gets more complicated and decisions accumulate as the years mount. Is it possible a wrong turn took you down a path that only seemed right at the time?
I previously read Hazzard's The Great Fire and loved it--even more on the second reading. I am certain the wonders of this book will shine even more when I am ready to sit down with it again. It was great to do this as a group reading as it added so much. It did remind me of Towles Rules of Civility in many ways with a London rather than NYC setting. If you liked that you will certainly enjoy this.
June 3, 2021
I have been thinking about how to review this book for three days and still don't really know what to say about it. It is an impressively controlled piece of storytelling - the reader's knowledge is always a little ahead of the characters, but the author keeps a few key revelations up her sleeve. Reading it over 40 years after its publication and many years more after the events early in the story, it does inevitably show its age - much of it is set in a lost world where for most women the only options were low paid drudgery or marriage, and Caro's journey is both moving and plausible. The narrative is rich and multi-layered, and Hazzard uses language with precision. Despite the title, astronomy has a very peripheral role in the story.
April 10, 2018
My second Shirley Harzzard novel in a short space of time. The previous, People in Glass Houses, I thoroughly enjoyed so was looking forward to reading The Transit Of Venus. To say I have been surprised by this book would be an understatement. Both books are chalk and cheese in delivery and concept.
Be that as it may The Transit Of Venus is one of the most compelling novels I have read for reasons I am not going to be able to articulate particularly well. The plot itself seems fairly shallow but then the plot may itself not be the point. The title is very good as the book is about Love but not in the cloying way I should imagine a Mills and Boons Novel being. This book is about its transient nature and the morality of it as a weapon. The cast of characters are very middle class and speak to each other in a manner that leaves a lot unsaid and would be very alien to the vast majority of working people.
On reaching the end of the book I realised that I had missed subtleties that the more astute than me would have picked up on the way through. With that I can see me rereading this in the future. It remind's me of that record you buy that on the first listen you know you need to immerse yourself more and once immersed grows to stand the test of time.
Be that as it may The Transit Of Venus is one of the most compelling novels I have read for reasons I am not going to be able to articulate particularly well. The plot itself seems fairly shallow but then the plot may itself not be the point. The title is very good as the book is about Love but not in the cloying way I should imagine a Mills and Boons Novel being. This book is about its transient nature and the morality of it as a weapon. The cast of characters are very middle class and speak to each other in a manner that leaves a lot unsaid and would be very alien to the vast majority of working people.
On reaching the end of the book I realised that I had missed subtleties that the more astute than me would have picked up on the way through. With that I can see me rereading this in the future. It remind's me of that record you buy that on the first listen you know you need to immerse yourself more and once immersed grows to stand the test of time.
January 1, 2022
I think that this was quite a good novel up to about the half way point. I was interested in Caro's character - her intelligence, her suffering etc. And then at the end - which annoyed me intensely, I rallied by realising that it's one of those novels where the author has had an idea - and then lost wind as to following through. All the later "stuff": Christian Thrale's romantic adventure, Grace Thrale's brush with love; even the point at which Adam Vail is brought in finally just seems like a lot of "padding" - it was necessary for Time To Pass. Ted Tice and Caro are in their mid-fifties when finally Carol realizes that Ted was, has been, always will be the better man. But too late. We understand the beginning statement about Ted - right at the start of this novel and say yes - not surprising.
And this whole set up - the whole story is to prove what - exactly? That life will always thwart the recognition of true love that lovers once they have reached the perfect pitch of love - are of no further interest - or that perfect love must be doomed. Or that life will thwart what humans aspire to - in the way of romantic love?
I don't know. There was a lot on politics, cabinet ministers, government secretaries, women's lack of equality, references to South American atrocities, references to US Government scandals - controlled and washed under the radar by media etc. A lot of stuff to get through - intermixed with the various love stories. Some really obnoxious characters - Dora and Paul Ivory - all exquisitely defined in the degree and intensity of their rottenness. Caro and Grace - sisters from Australia contrasted beautifully with the UK natives.
I feel cheated - a lot of time spent. Interesting also because I enjoyed - The Bay of Noon, and The Evening of the Holiday - both much shorter and both more or less happy but also suprisingly doomed love stories.
GRIEF....
And this whole set up - the whole story is to prove what - exactly? That life will always thwart the recognition of true love that lovers once they have reached the perfect pitch of love - are of no further interest - or that perfect love must be doomed. Or that life will thwart what humans aspire to - in the way of romantic love?
I don't know. There was a lot on politics, cabinet ministers, government secretaries, women's lack of equality, references to South American atrocities, references to US Government scandals - controlled and washed under the radar by media etc. A lot of stuff to get through - intermixed with the various love stories. Some really obnoxious characters - Dora and Paul Ivory - all exquisitely defined in the degree and intensity of their rottenness. Caro and Grace - sisters from Australia contrasted beautifully with the UK natives.
I feel cheated - a lot of time spent. Interesting also because I enjoyed - The Bay of Noon, and The Evening of the Holiday - both much shorter and both more or less happy but also suprisingly doomed love stories.
GRIEF....
January 18, 2020
THE TRANSIT OF VENUS (1980) is a shockingly brilliant novel about the transience of love. It is the story of two Australian sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, who emigrate to England in the 1950s. Orphaned while young by their parents’ deaths in a Sydney harbour ferry sinking, the sisters have been raised by their older half-sister Dora. On their arrival as young women in Britain, gentle Grace quickly marries and settles into an apparently uneventful marriage with a self-satisfied man of means. Caro, the elder sister and the novel’s protagonist, is a different kind of woman. Most of the book is about Caro's story.
Hazzard was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1931. Eventually she traveled to the United States and took a job at the United Nations. She had earlier held government-service posts in Hong Kong and New Zealand. Her prose is, elegant, mesmerizing, erudite, not devoid of wry humor.
Cleverly concealed lurk all the clues which the reader needs to piece together to really understand the devastating ending of the story. In fact, the novel changes quite abruptly from a complex, beautifully written tragic love story to a chilling examination of integrity and selfhood. The ending is like a puzzle which only the attentive readers will be able to solve.
I finished reading the novel late last night and immediately started rereading parts of it. I was overwhelmed and moved by its depth and complexity. I can quite agree with Hazzard’s husband, Francis Steegmuller, who remarked that nobody should ever have to read this book for the first time. I need to return to it, soon. But first, I will read her other novels.
I can't recommend this book highly enough. It has won several prizes, it has been endorsed by many prestigious critics. Please do yourself a favor and read it.
Hazzard was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1931. Eventually she traveled to the United States and took a job at the United Nations. She had earlier held government-service posts in Hong Kong and New Zealand. Her prose is, elegant, mesmerizing, erudite, not devoid of wry humor.
Cleverly concealed lurk all the clues which the reader needs to piece together to really understand the devastating ending of the story. In fact, the novel changes quite abruptly from a complex, beautifully written tragic love story to a chilling examination of integrity and selfhood. The ending is like a puzzle which only the attentive readers will be able to solve.
I finished reading the novel late last night and immediately started rereading parts of it. I was overwhelmed and moved by its depth and complexity. I can quite agree with Hazzard’s husband, Francis Steegmuller, who remarked that nobody should ever have to read this book for the first time. I need to return to it, soon. But first, I will read her other novels.
I can't recommend this book highly enough. It has won several prizes, it has been endorsed by many prestigious critics. Please do yourself a favor and read it.
September 20, 2008
Some years ago I read a New Yorker story by Hazzard, "In These Islands." I read it a second time, then and there. Turned back to the first page and read it again. Then a third time.
There are expansive writers--like the late DFW, Whitman, Henry Miller--and there those who fuse language in a crucible: Dickinson, Laura Riding, George Oppen: poets more often than novelists... though McCarthy has gone from one to the other, from the expansive Sutree to the compression of The Road.
No one can capture a character in passing a phrase like Hazzard... what reminds me of Dickinson is not her poems, but her letters. My parents, she writes to Higgenson, "address every morning an eclipse they call 'our father.'
This is the novel as a kind of poetry. Visionary... compressed into a kind of breathless irony.
There are expansive writers--like the late DFW, Whitman, Henry Miller--and there those who fuse language in a crucible: Dickinson, Laura Riding, George Oppen: poets more often than novelists... though McCarthy has gone from one to the other, from the expansive Sutree to the compression of The Road.
No one can capture a character in passing a phrase like Hazzard... what reminds me of Dickinson is not her poems, but her letters. My parents, she writes to Higgenson, "address every morning an eclipse they call 'our father.'
This is the novel as a kind of poetry. Visionary... compressed into a kind of breathless irony.
March 7, 2008
I was caught by surprise by this book. I heard about it from an interview with Ann Patchet I'd read online. I think it is one of the finest written novels I have ever read. The night I finished the book, I opened it back up and started reading it again. The second time through I was as engrossed - actually more than the first. It was tough to get started, she doesn't build the characters traditionally. You find out odd things about them that don't seem important until much later in the book. I think if you can make it through the first 100 pages you will be hooked and when you finish it you find that you have read one of the finest pieces of literature available.
November 21, 2017
An incredible book - Charlotte Wood's discussion says it all more eloquently than I ever could: https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/trans...
April 14, 2012
I could appreciate the intelligent writing in this novel - certainly Ms. Hazzard is quite cerebral. And there were some great points of memorable language and insight. But for me, this is not the brilliant novel that others seem to think it is. One of my problems was the characters: either they were a little obtuse as to make me wonder at their actions based on the way the author had drawn them, or they were so obvious they got boring - the self-satisfied, philandering husband, the long-suffering wife, the lovelorn 'other guy' who pines and pines and pines ad nauseam. The pace of the story was uneven - started slow, picked up, but then seemed to grind to a long slog to the 'big bang' ending. And when I'm so distracted by a story's mechanics that I find myself thinking, "Add the next character, already!" (and then she does) I know it's not working for me. The ending: I don't want to say too much about what others found to be a highly satisfying 'jolt' of a late back story. And I realize she wrote this in a time when her viewpoint would have been widely shared and accepted. But was no one else bothered by this stereotype? I detected a note of prejudice that just really stuck with me/ bugged me. Thus the 1 star. Cannot recommend - but I'm clearly in the minority here.
February 26, 2021
Read this book – and you should read this book – carefully. You should read it carefully because it is packed with passages that you will want to read more than once simply to savor their beauty ( “...the sky, on a shadeless day, suddenly lowered itself like an awning.”) and passages that capture a character in a phrase (“Dora sat on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it.”). There are also passages you will read more than once to be sure you understand them. But it is a safe bet that even the most attentive reader, at some point in the last 20-30 pages, will skim back through the book to find the breadcrumbs Shirley Hazzard left for us and to confirm that what you think happened did indeed happen.
A transit of Venus is a rare but predictable astronomical event that occurs when the planet Venus passes directly between the Earth and the Sun. The Transit of Venus is a love story or, more precisely, it is a novel about love – about the arc of its passage and its subjection to laws as inexorable as those that govern the movement of the planets – and it is a novel about the individual's struggle for moral integrity and control of his/her own destiny. It unfolds over thirty years, following Grace and Caroline Bell, two young Australian sisters orphaned as children, who make their way to England after World War II. Both are beautiful – fair and timid Grace who embarks on a conventional marriage, dark and forthright Caro who is loved, betrayed, and the subject of a long unrequited love. ("...the tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.")
This is an elegantly written and brilliantly constructed novel, often deservedly counted among the best of the 20th century. Its leisurely pace and genteel ambiance belie the depth of Shirley Hazzard's ideas about innocence, power, corruption, injustice, and gender, and the revelation of its secrets, all intricately foreshadowed, leaves us dazzled and shaken. When you've read the last page and have persuaded yourself that you know what happened, don't be surprised if you find yourself reading the ending again to see if it might come out differently. This is a book that demands – and is worthy of – your full attention. More than once.
A transit of Venus is a rare but predictable astronomical event that occurs when the planet Venus passes directly between the Earth and the Sun. The Transit of Venus is a love story or, more precisely, it is a novel about love – about the arc of its passage and its subjection to laws as inexorable as those that govern the movement of the planets – and it is a novel about the individual's struggle for moral integrity and control of his/her own destiny. It unfolds over thirty years, following Grace and Caroline Bell, two young Australian sisters orphaned as children, who make their way to England after World War II. Both are beautiful – fair and timid Grace who embarks on a conventional marriage, dark and forthright Caro who is loved, betrayed, and the subject of a long unrequited love. ("...the tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.")
This is an elegantly written and brilliantly constructed novel, often deservedly counted among the best of the 20th century. Its leisurely pace and genteel ambiance belie the depth of Shirley Hazzard's ideas about innocence, power, corruption, injustice, and gender, and the revelation of its secrets, all intricately foreshadowed, leaves us dazzled and shaken. When you've read the last page and have persuaded yourself that you know what happened, don't be surprised if you find yourself reading the ending again to see if it might come out differently. This is a book that demands – and is worthy of – your full attention. More than once.
June 24, 2023
It's taken me some weeks to think about what I want to say about The Transit of Venus, one of the most brilliant books Ive read for a long time. Ive read quite a lot about Shirley HazzardHazzard in the meantime, and come to understand more about her approach to writing, so committed to the search for perfection that she wrote only four novels.
This, her third, won the 1980 US National Book Critics Circle Award, unusual for a writer born and raised in Australia, but Hazzard was an unusually cosmopolitan woman for her times (1931-2016) and was eventually a citizen of both the US and Australia.
It was more than 20 years later before her fourth book emerged – The Great FireThe Great Fire, which also won the National Book Award for fiction (2003) and Australia’s Miles Franklin Award. It too is wonderful - I read it years ago and it lives vividly in memory.
Hazzard's writing leaps off the page. Every word, every sentence is just as it should be to achieve the effect she wanted.
In an interview which she said that truth is all. Words must convey truth, writing must convey truth or there was no point in writing. And this is what she achieves.
I often found I was brought up short by a description or a phrase. Marvellous. She bravely addresses the subject of love, in many moods and many forms. Barbara Pym’s work is also acutely observed, but characters inhabit negative worlds. Hazzard’s characters experience intense joy, pain, disillusion, contempt even as their relationships progress – some to fail, some to flower and some to slow death.
If I were to try to summarise Transit of Venus I know I would trivialise it, as most of the book’s brief descriptions do.
I’m going to quote from a 2021 New York Times review by Parul Seghal, because he has captured some of its complexity and uses some of Hazzard’s own words:
'The plot is chaste, and simplicity itself. I can stuff it into one sentence. Two orphaned Australian sisters arrive in England in the 1950s: placid, fair Grace, who marries a wealthy and officious bureaucrat, and independent, dark-haired Caroline, who falls in love with the unscrupulous (and attached) Paul Ivory, while another man, the shabby and sweet Ted Tice, pines for her.
Nothing unduly challenging — except, perhaps, that the book is precisely about the misapprehensions of youth, of missing the point and those late-in-life revelations that return us to elemental questions — “Who are the weak?” Caroline wonders. “Who are the strong?”
It’s a novel about being wrong about this question and so many others, about our gorgeous and distressing human confidence, the way we march around, plucky protagonists in our minds, armed with horrifyingly partial knowledge of the motivations of those around us. To say nothing of the forces we cannot see. Hazzard’s stories are always enfolded in larger histories, of geological time, of empire’s “jagged devastations” and the long shadow of World War I, which darkens almost every page of this novel, in the broken bodies of former soldiers, the “scabs” of blackout paint on the windows, the cowed fright of the characters, even at their calmest. As the sisters sit, eating dessert, Hazzard lingers on their necks — “intolerably exposed,” she writes. “You could practically feel the axe.”'
One of my favourite scenes in the book is when Christian, the ‘wealthy and officious bureaucrat’, visits the sisters for the first time, already taken with gentle Grace: “He found these women uncommonly self-possessed for their situation. They seemed scarcely conscious of being Australians in a furnished flat. He would have liked them to be more impressed by his having come, and instead found himself living up to what he thought might be their standards and hoping they would not guess the effort incurred. Quickness came back to him like a neglected talent summoned in an emergency: as if he rose in trepidation to a platform and cleared his throat to sing.
The room itself appeared unawed by him – not from any disorder but from very naturalness. A room where there had been expectation would have conveyed the fact – by a tension of plumped cushions and placed magazines. … this room was quite without such anxiety. On its upholstery, the nap of the usual was undisturbed."
Some examples of her writing:
Ted Tice, (who is not of the right class) thinking on class gulfs and humiliation: Men can make up soon enough with enemies who slaughtered them in battle, but never with the brethren who humiliated them in cold blood. They take reprisal on their own shame – that is what makes all hatreds, in war, in class or in love.
Caro to Paul after they had begun their sexual relationship:
There must be an end somewhere to deception. Ultimately there must be the truth’.
‘and do you think the human need to deceive is not also part of the truth?’
‘Of reality, not truth.’
Paul evades, of course, and then impregnates his wife, ending the relationship with Caro. To end it, perhaps?
American Adam Vail, at the beginning of his relationship with Caro (p186): ‘He thought most men would hardly dare touch her, or only with anger, because she would not pretend anything was casual. It was unflattering, what she was apparently willing to dispense with in consequence of this belief’.
Adam says ‘Our great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon, rather than a civilization. Hence, in part, the scale, the insistence, the need to prove the great mysteries obsolete or serviceable. We want our lust to be loved and called beautiful. To receive the homage due to love’.
A sentence on a conversation with the boy Felix: ‘Monosyllables were planted like bollards, closing every avenue’ of conversation. P 292
Some background on Hazzard.
Although she grew up in Sydney in the 1930s and 40s, her father joined the diplomatic service and was posted to Hong Kong in 1947 when Shirley was 16. Then back to Australia, then New Zealand and when she was 20 the family moved to New York, where she worked for the United Nations as a typist for 10 years. During that time she was posted to Naples in Italy for a year and continued to visit Italy throughout her life, eventually living between Italy and New York with her writer husband, Francis Steegmuller.
In addition to fiction, Hazzard wrote two nonfiction books critical of the United Nations: Defeat of an Ideal (1973) and Countenance of Truth (1990). Defeat of an Ideal presents evidence of the apparently widespread McCarthyism in the Secretariat from 1951 to 1955.[9] Countenance of Truth alleges that senior international diplomats had been aware of the Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim yet allowed him to rise through the Secretariat ranks to the position of Secretary-General, a claim she first made in a 1980 New Republic article.[2][9] Her collection of short stories, People in Glass Houses, is presented as a satire on "The Organisation", manifestly inspired by the United Nations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley....
The Wikipedia entry from which I’ve just quoted doesn't mention whether she lived in England, or for how long, but in Transit of Venus she shows an acute awareness of English class prejudices and behaviours, political and social nastiness and bureaucratic intrigue.
Brigitta Olubas has recently published a literary biography of Hazzard, which is waiting for me on my actual bookshelves. Review at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
Reviews
New York Times 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/bo...
Charlotte Wood in Sydney Review of Books https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay...
Three from the Paris Review
https://www.theparisreview.org/interv...
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
Michele de Kretser https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
In On Shirley Hazzard: Writers on Writers gives many examples of Hazards' acuity of observation and genius of expression.
This, her third, won the 1980 US National Book Critics Circle Award, unusual for a writer born and raised in Australia, but Hazzard was an unusually cosmopolitan woman for her times (1931-2016) and was eventually a citizen of both the US and Australia.
It was more than 20 years later before her fourth book emerged – The Great FireThe Great Fire, which also won the National Book Award for fiction (2003) and Australia’s Miles Franklin Award. It too is wonderful - I read it years ago and it lives vividly in memory.
Hazzard's writing leaps off the page. Every word, every sentence is just as it should be to achieve the effect she wanted.
In an interview which she said that truth is all. Words must convey truth, writing must convey truth or there was no point in writing. And this is what she achieves.
I often found I was brought up short by a description or a phrase. Marvellous. She bravely addresses the subject of love, in many moods and many forms. Barbara Pym’s work is also acutely observed, but characters inhabit negative worlds. Hazzard’s characters experience intense joy, pain, disillusion, contempt even as their relationships progress – some to fail, some to flower and some to slow death.
If I were to try to summarise Transit of Venus I know I would trivialise it, as most of the book’s brief descriptions do.
I’m going to quote from a 2021 New York Times review by Parul Seghal, because he has captured some of its complexity and uses some of Hazzard’s own words:
'The plot is chaste, and simplicity itself. I can stuff it into one sentence. Two orphaned Australian sisters arrive in England in the 1950s: placid, fair Grace, who marries a wealthy and officious bureaucrat, and independent, dark-haired Caroline, who falls in love with the unscrupulous (and attached) Paul Ivory, while another man, the shabby and sweet Ted Tice, pines for her.
Nothing unduly challenging — except, perhaps, that the book is precisely about the misapprehensions of youth, of missing the point and those late-in-life revelations that return us to elemental questions — “Who are the weak?” Caroline wonders. “Who are the strong?”
It’s a novel about being wrong about this question and so many others, about our gorgeous and distressing human confidence, the way we march around, plucky protagonists in our minds, armed with horrifyingly partial knowledge of the motivations of those around us. To say nothing of the forces we cannot see. Hazzard’s stories are always enfolded in larger histories, of geological time, of empire’s “jagged devastations” and the long shadow of World War I, which darkens almost every page of this novel, in the broken bodies of former soldiers, the “scabs” of blackout paint on the windows, the cowed fright of the characters, even at their calmest. As the sisters sit, eating dessert, Hazzard lingers on their necks — “intolerably exposed,” she writes. “You could practically feel the axe.”'
One of my favourite scenes in the book is when Christian, the ‘wealthy and officious bureaucrat’, visits the sisters for the first time, already taken with gentle Grace: “He found these women uncommonly self-possessed for their situation. They seemed scarcely conscious of being Australians in a furnished flat. He would have liked them to be more impressed by his having come, and instead found himself living up to what he thought might be their standards and hoping they would not guess the effort incurred. Quickness came back to him like a neglected talent summoned in an emergency: as if he rose in trepidation to a platform and cleared his throat to sing.
The room itself appeared unawed by him – not from any disorder but from very naturalness. A room where there had been expectation would have conveyed the fact – by a tension of plumped cushions and placed magazines. … this room was quite without such anxiety. On its upholstery, the nap of the usual was undisturbed."
Some examples of her writing:
Ted Tice, (who is not of the right class) thinking on class gulfs and humiliation: Men can make up soon enough with enemies who slaughtered them in battle, but never with the brethren who humiliated them in cold blood. They take reprisal on their own shame – that is what makes all hatreds, in war, in class or in love.
Caro to Paul after they had begun their sexual relationship:
There must be an end somewhere to deception. Ultimately there must be the truth’.
‘and do you think the human need to deceive is not also part of the truth?’
‘Of reality, not truth.’
Paul evades, of course, and then impregnates his wife, ending the relationship with Caro. To end it, perhaps?
American Adam Vail, at the beginning of his relationship with Caro (p186): ‘He thought most men would hardly dare touch her, or only with anger, because she would not pretend anything was casual. It was unflattering, what she was apparently willing to dispense with in consequence of this belief’.
Adam says ‘Our great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon, rather than a civilization. Hence, in part, the scale, the insistence, the need to prove the great mysteries obsolete or serviceable. We want our lust to be loved and called beautiful. To receive the homage due to love’.
A sentence on a conversation with the boy Felix: ‘Monosyllables were planted like bollards, closing every avenue’ of conversation. P 292
Some background on Hazzard.
Although she grew up in Sydney in the 1930s and 40s, her father joined the diplomatic service and was posted to Hong Kong in 1947 when Shirley was 16. Then back to Australia, then New Zealand and when she was 20 the family moved to New York, where she worked for the United Nations as a typist for 10 years. During that time she was posted to Naples in Italy for a year and continued to visit Italy throughout her life, eventually living between Italy and New York with her writer husband, Francis Steegmuller.
In addition to fiction, Hazzard wrote two nonfiction books critical of the United Nations: Defeat of an Ideal (1973) and Countenance of Truth (1990). Defeat of an Ideal presents evidence of the apparently widespread McCarthyism in the Secretariat from 1951 to 1955.[9] Countenance of Truth alleges that senior international diplomats had been aware of the Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim yet allowed him to rise through the Secretariat ranks to the position of Secretary-General, a claim she first made in a 1980 New Republic article.[2][9] Her collection of short stories, People in Glass Houses, is presented as a satire on "The Organisation", manifestly inspired by the United Nations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley....
The Wikipedia entry from which I’ve just quoted doesn't mention whether she lived in England, or for how long, but in Transit of Venus she shows an acute awareness of English class prejudices and behaviours, political and social nastiness and bureaucratic intrigue.
Brigitta Olubas has recently published a literary biography of Hazzard, which is waiting for me on my actual bookshelves. Review at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
Reviews
New York Times 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/bo...
Charlotte Wood in Sydney Review of Books https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay...
Three from the Paris Review
https://www.theparisreview.org/interv...
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
Michele de Kretser https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
In On Shirley Hazzard: Writers on Writers gives many examples of Hazards' acuity of observation and genius of expression.
March 30, 2023
UPDATE 2/23/22: I saw Hamilton last night, and found myself distracted for much of it because I couldn't stop thinking about The Transit of Venus. Hazzard teaches us SO well the importance of perspective/who is telling the story, and I just couldn't stop reflecting on this novel in the whole Eliza/Angelica dynamic! (Yes, I was actually distracted FROM HAMILTON because of thinking about this book. it's actually that good.)
Original Review: I don't remember the last time I read a novel as intricately plotted as The Transit of Venus. Seriously, every word in this book is significant, and the payoff by the end is exceptional. This book is executed so so perfectly.
Reflecting further, I don't know how I had never even heard of it. Like, this belongs up there with all the great novels of the 20th century. Where is Transit in all the lists of great books?? Basically this is me trying to convince you to read it, because every word is pure magic.
Hazzard tells us nearly everything we need to know within the first pages, yet it's only with the knowledge of the final paragraphs that we understand the true significance of these events. ”By nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation," the novel begins. ”It was simply that the sky, on a shadeless day, suddenly lowered itself like an awning. Purple silence petrified the limbs of trees and stood crops upright in the fields like hair on end…This occurred shortly after midday on a summer Monday in the south of England.” Through her startling imagery we learn of a flood, a destructive storm, and into this cosmic atmosphere is thrust a man, ”walking slowly into a landscape under a branch of lightning. . . Only he, kinetic, advanced against circumstances to a single destination.”
Like the man, who we soon learn to be Edmund (Ted) Tice, the novel advances toward a single destination. Hazzard’s narrator seems to see every event with a cosmic scale, and as a result there are no spoilers to this novel. Within the first 10 pages, we learn that Ted will ultimately commit suicide; yet it is only in the novel’s last words that we have the perspective to understand why. In the meantime, Ted meets Grace and Caroline, orphaned sisters from Australia, and falls irreparably in love with Caro; they meet Paul Ivory, who will marry Tertia despite Caro’s love for him; and Ted works under Sefton Thrale, whose son will marry Grace. They live briefly at Peverel, the home of Sefton and Charmian Thrale, and the consequences of their youthful choices that summer will ripple out into the next 30 years of life.
This book is a Greek tragedy, played out in a postmodern context. It's also, somehow, like reading Jane Austen or Middlemarch. The characters wrestle with the realities of life after WWII, and yet the questions have not changed in the course of human history. Hazzard’s writing is difficult to get through because of how rich it is; every sentence of this book could be broken apart and thoughtfully reflected upon. But oh my WORD, the payoff by the novel’s end is unreal. I cannot describe how satisfying the revelations in the last part were to read.
Still not convinced? Here are a couple more of my favorites:
"Wearing a cardigan that had perhaps been blue, Caro was pouring water from a jug. In looks, Caro was as yet unfinished, lacking some revelation that might simply be her own awareness; unlike Grace, who was completed if not complete."
"It was inconceivable that he could not touch or take hold of her light-blue body that had power over all his days. The very outline of the earth, beyond her, was nothing to it. 'You're as distant from me now as you'll be when we're separated. There's no happiness in this for me, our standing together here and now. But I'll think of it, later, as being close to you, and lucky.'"
"With these prospects and impressions, she, forty-three years old, stood silent in a hotel doorway in her worn blue coat and looked at the cars and the stars, 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."
This is a novel about love in all its forms, about tragedy and fate in a postmodern world, about age and youth and all the regrets we slowly aqcuire, or learn to redeem. It's a reflection on how truth always makes itself apparent and how we catch the outlines of love and beauty when they come against the backdrop of a sort of blazing sun like war or loss. The Transit of Venus is a raging current sweeping you along and a mesmerizing spell of lucid, vibrant prose.
This is also one that will only get better with time and rereads. It’s one that I’m giving 5 stars to, not because of the first read through, but because I know that it will only grow richer as the years go by (I already look at my 4-star rating of To the Lighthouse from 2020 with skepticism and wonder how I didn’t give it 5). Seriously, this is worth your time, despite the difficulty of getting through the first half. A new all-time favorite, and one I will treasure for years to come.
Original Review: I don't remember the last time I read a novel as intricately plotted as The Transit of Venus. Seriously, every word in this book is significant, and the payoff by the end is exceptional. This book is executed so so perfectly.
Reflecting further, I don't know how I had never even heard of it. Like, this belongs up there with all the great novels of the 20th century. Where is Transit in all the lists of great books?? Basically this is me trying to convince you to read it, because every word is pure magic.
Hazzard tells us nearly everything we need to know within the first pages, yet it's only with the knowledge of the final paragraphs that we understand the true significance of these events. ”By nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation," the novel begins. ”It was simply that the sky, on a shadeless day, suddenly lowered itself like an awning. Purple silence petrified the limbs of trees and stood crops upright in the fields like hair on end…This occurred shortly after midday on a summer Monday in the south of England.” Through her startling imagery we learn of a flood, a destructive storm, and into this cosmic atmosphere is thrust a man, ”walking slowly into a landscape under a branch of lightning. . . Only he, kinetic, advanced against circumstances to a single destination.”
Like the man, who we soon learn to be Edmund (Ted) Tice, the novel advances toward a single destination. Hazzard’s narrator seems to see every event with a cosmic scale, and as a result there are no spoilers to this novel. Within the first 10 pages, we learn that Ted will ultimately commit suicide; yet it is only in the novel’s last words that we have the perspective to understand why. In the meantime, Ted meets Grace and Caroline, orphaned sisters from Australia, and falls irreparably in love with Caro; they meet Paul Ivory, who will marry Tertia despite Caro’s love for him; and Ted works under Sefton Thrale, whose son will marry Grace. They live briefly at Peverel, the home of Sefton and Charmian Thrale, and the consequences of their youthful choices that summer will ripple out into the next 30 years of life.
This book is a Greek tragedy, played out in a postmodern context. It's also, somehow, like reading Jane Austen or Middlemarch. The characters wrestle with the realities of life after WWII, and yet the questions have not changed in the course of human history. Hazzard’s writing is difficult to get through because of how rich it is; every sentence of this book could be broken apart and thoughtfully reflected upon. But oh my WORD, the payoff by the novel’s end is unreal. I cannot describe how satisfying the revelations in the last part were to read.
Still not convinced? Here are a couple more of my favorites:
"Wearing a cardigan that had perhaps been blue, Caro was pouring water from a jug. In looks, Caro was as yet unfinished, lacking some revelation that might simply be her own awareness; unlike Grace, who was completed if not complete."
"It was inconceivable that he could not touch or take hold of her light-blue body that had power over all his days. The very outline of the earth, beyond her, was nothing to it. 'You're as distant from me now as you'll be when we're separated. There's no happiness in this for me, our standing together here and now. But I'll think of it, later, as being close to you, and lucky.'"
"With these prospects and impressions, she, forty-three years old, stood silent in a hotel doorway in her worn blue coat and looked at the cars and the stars, 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."
This is a novel about love in all its forms, about tragedy and fate in a postmodern world, about age and youth and all the regrets we slowly aqcuire, or learn to redeem. It's a reflection on how truth always makes itself apparent and how we catch the outlines of love and beauty when they come against the backdrop of a sort of blazing sun like war or loss. The Transit of Venus is a raging current sweeping you along and a mesmerizing spell of lucid, vibrant prose.
This is also one that will only get better with time and rereads. It’s one that I’m giving 5 stars to, not because of the first read through, but because I know that it will only grow richer as the years go by (I already look at my 4-star rating of To the Lighthouse from 2020 with skepticism and wonder how I didn’t give it 5). Seriously, this is worth your time, despite the difficulty of getting through the first half. A new all-time favorite, and one I will treasure for years to come.
April 12, 2011
I was torn as to how to rate Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus. Hazzard is an enormously gifted writer. But the novel itself had me asking the question, When does a great writer become a great artist? It's a fine distinction that one doesn't come across often, since such things unfold on their own. The discerning reader simply knows when they've read a great piece of literature. But Hazzard's own ambition here had me asking that very question. In other words, one gets the sense that Hazzard, in The Transit of Venus, set out to write a great novel. There are certainly numerous stretches of great writing - but as a novel, I felt its Jamesian (last phase) excesses turned the reading into something of an ordeal by book's end. In fairness, I think I prefer Hazzard to James in that she writes of Love in a more believable way - and I'm talking of Love as in Shakespeare or Donne. (And stuff actually happens!) People certainly don't talk like Hazzard has them talk - but any lover of language has to wish that they did. Hazzard writes prose that is better than most contemporary poetry. And boy, can she frame a scene, like placing actors on a stage - and with good lines! But such staginess is risky, and in long novel it can wear. Some of Hazzard's side stories, such as Christian's affair, or his wife Grace's near-affair, could have been trimmed. Also, the "political" insertions sounded just like that - insertions, or recollections of old anti-American table talk with Hazzard's good friend Graham Greene. Then there's the sense of time - it comes and goes. Yes, I get a sense of the fifties, but not so much the sixties or later. Such historical convulsions should of made more of a reading impression. In all it makes for an uneven reading effort - which is odd, given the precision of Hazzard's writing and plotting. But the good news is that Hazzard has written a great novel - it's called The Great Fire.
September 20, 2021
There were pages where I loved The Transit of Venus for its pathos, its characters, its unrequited loves, and then there were pages where it was like wading through treacle and it made my brain ache. I suspect if you love classic novels, you'll love this. It's very wordy, very erudite and although I read some sentences several times I still didn't understand what they meant. Two Australian sisters, Caro and Grace lose their parents when they are young and come to England. Mostly we follow Caro, as she has an affair, eventually marries, and rejects the man who has always loved her. I found Caro difficult, or maybe it was her passages that were the most dense. We also follow Grace and her awful husband, and it was these two, and the passion that slips out of Grace's fingers, and the terrible things that her husband does which moved me the most. I read Hazzard's The Great Fire some time ago, and although I don't remember it well, I think I remember it more fondly than I'll remember this one. I'm not saying don't read, just prepare yourself.
June 2, 2024
The Transit of Venus is a jewelled faberge egg, with a tricky mechanism that you need to solve to get inside. Many will give up in frustration, some will persist to the end but never crack the egg and be left underwhelmed, others will finally get to the glittering inside and just want to do it all over again.
When I started this book I immediately felt like it was a book I'd need to read twice. Sure enough when I did some research I found Hazzard's husband Francis Steegmuller quoted as saying;
"No one should ever have to read The Transit of Venus a first time."
Behind that sentence is almost all you need to know about this book. It's a masterpiece but you have to learn its ways to fully appreciate it. Hazzard floats in rarefied literary air and her writing is flawless. She's the sort of writer who keeps other writers up at night.
As for the book itself it's about love and power. It's about the trials facing a talented and passionate woman in the 20th century. Throughout the book I wondered how much of Hazzard was in Caroline Bell. How much of Caroline's story is pulled from Hazzard's own struggles being a brilliant woman surrounded by and working under mediocre men? I'm not sure I'll ever know the answer to that one but I think a book with this much feeling must have been pulled from a deep well of true emotion.
Caroline Bell's life shows us the path set for limitless talent in a restrained society. It's devastating. Under different circumstances Caro could have easily been the doyenne of any field. It's in Caro's unrealised potential that you see this novel's approach to power; the immense power needed to hold down a person with such integrity and strength. And even worse to slowly whittle away at her strength until she's brought to ground with a final devastating realisation.
The writing speaks for itself and Hazzard has a brilliant talent for posing questions of the characters that are really to be answered by the reader. The trials and tests she puts her characters through are actually designed for us. We're meant to examine our souls as much as, if not more than, those of the characters.
I would challenge any man to disagree with the following statement;
"Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they're made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that it was neither the moment nor the true self."
And Hazzard wasn't just brilliant on the page, she lived the life we expect of a literary master. Probably racing Steegmuller to solve the cryptic every morning, travelling with Graham Greene, lunching in Portofino, and dining in Monaco. She was one of Australia's greats and the literary gifts she has left behind are pockets of historical meaning and context.
At the end of The Transit of Venus the reader is once again tasked with plumbing the depths of their own soul. Most will say it's pretty doom and gloom but I can eke out a happy ending with what was presented to me.
When I got to the end I knew I would read it again some day and it would reward me even more for that effort.
Now for some of this glorious prose. Hazzard captured the sentiment of moving to Europe that countless Australians feel (even if it's no longer quite accurate)
Going to Europe someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no one returned the same.
Those returning in such ships were invincible, for they had managed it and could reflect ever after on Anne Hathaway's Cottage or the Tower of London with a confidence that did not generate at Sydney. There was nothing mythic at Sydney: momentous objects, beings, and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books. Sydney could never be taken for granted, as did the very meanest town in Europe, that poet might be born there or a great painter walk beneath its windows. The likelihood did not arise, they did not feel they had deserved it. That was the measure of resentful obscurity: they could not imagine a person who might expose or exalt it.
There was the harbour, and the open sea. It was an atmosphere in which a sunset might be comfortably admired, but not much else. Any more private joy - in light or dark, in leaf or gatepost - savoured of revelation was uncountenanced; even in wisteria or wattle on mornings newer, surely, than anywhere else could by now achieve. There was a stillness on certain evenings, or a cast to rocks, or a design of languid branch against the sky that might be announcing glory."
This stuff just takes your breath away
They Crossed to the entrance of the Underground.... In the rush of tunnelled air they turned to stare at one another. A look two persons might exchange who, having carried an immense weight to some forlorn halt, now set it down and meet each other's eyes. Grace had come as far as she could; Ted would go down alone.
Nailed it Shirley
In modern buildings opposite the Vail house, all ground floors were doctors' offices. In the early mornings ageing men and women would arrive without breakfast to ring these doorbells."
Adam Vail gets all the best lines
"Our great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon, rather than a civilization. Hence, in part, the scale, the insistence, the need to prove the great mysteries obsolete or serviceable. We want our lust to be loved and called beautiful. To receive the homage due to love."
Grim Scottish childhood.
The house, which was in the Black Isle, was always cold, not only from heatlessness but from austerity. "They like it bare. Predictably enough my sister and I tend to clutter." There was only one picture in the house: "A framed photograph of the Tirpitz, which was sunk the day I was born....."
Poor Ted
In the restaurant, Ted Tice was watching Caro's lowered eyelids: the tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts."
Paul Ivory really was the villain
"It seemed incredible I couldn't get the better of them with the weapons I had—superior intelligence, good connections. Victor had—not intelligence, but a quickness. The children of brutes develop that early, trying to keep one step ahead of horror. He was clever, for instance about my play—knew exactly what was wanted when I needed help with speech or responses. There were no ideas in him, just this astuteness. But he put an immoderate value on his intelligence, because of the set he'd come from. Offspring of brutes have that in common with the children of affluence—they have no context for assessing their limitations"
Oh Grace...
"At first, there is something you expect of life, Later, there is what life expects of you. By the time you realise these are the same, it can be too late for expectations." What we are being, not what we are to be. They are the same thing.
When I started this book I immediately felt like it was a book I'd need to read twice. Sure enough when I did some research I found Hazzard's husband Francis Steegmuller quoted as saying;
"No one should ever have to read The Transit of Venus a first time."
Behind that sentence is almost all you need to know about this book. It's a masterpiece but you have to learn its ways to fully appreciate it. Hazzard floats in rarefied literary air and her writing is flawless. She's the sort of writer who keeps other writers up at night.
As for the book itself it's about love and power. It's about the trials facing a talented and passionate woman in the 20th century. Throughout the book I wondered how much of Hazzard was in Caroline Bell. How much of Caroline's story is pulled from Hazzard's own struggles being a brilliant woman surrounded by and working under mediocre men? I'm not sure I'll ever know the answer to that one but I think a book with this much feeling must have been pulled from a deep well of true emotion.
Caroline Bell's life shows us the path set for limitless talent in a restrained society. It's devastating. Under different circumstances Caro could have easily been the doyenne of any field. It's in Caro's unrealised potential that you see this novel's approach to power; the immense power needed to hold down a person with such integrity and strength. And even worse to slowly whittle away at her strength until she's brought to ground with a final devastating realisation.
The writing speaks for itself and Hazzard has a brilliant talent for posing questions of the characters that are really to be answered by the reader. The trials and tests she puts her characters through are actually designed for us. We're meant to examine our souls as much as, if not more than, those of the characters.
I would challenge any man to disagree with the following statement;
"Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they're made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that it was neither the moment nor the true self."
And Hazzard wasn't just brilliant on the page, she lived the life we expect of a literary master. Probably racing Steegmuller to solve the cryptic every morning, travelling with Graham Greene, lunching in Portofino, and dining in Monaco. She was one of Australia's greats and the literary gifts she has left behind are pockets of historical meaning and context.
At the end of The Transit of Venus the reader is once again tasked with plumbing the depths of their own soul. Most will say it's pretty doom and gloom but I can eke out a happy ending with what was presented to me.
When I got to the end I knew I would read it again some day and it would reward me even more for that effort.
Now for some of this glorious prose. Hazzard captured the sentiment of moving to Europe that countless Australians feel (even if it's no longer quite accurate)
Going to Europe someone had written, was about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage to another life, from which no one returned the same.
Those returning in such ships were invincible, for they had managed it and could reflect ever after on Anne Hathaway's Cottage or the Tower of London with a confidence that did not generate at Sydney. There was nothing mythic at Sydney: momentous objects, beings, and events all occurred abroad or in the elsewhere of books. Sydney could never be taken for granted, as did the very meanest town in Europe, that poet might be born there or a great painter walk beneath its windows. The likelihood did not arise, they did not feel they had deserved it. That was the measure of resentful obscurity: they could not imagine a person who might expose or exalt it.
There was the harbour, and the open sea. It was an atmosphere in which a sunset might be comfortably admired, but not much else. Any more private joy - in light or dark, in leaf or gatepost - savoured of revelation was uncountenanced; even in wisteria or wattle on mornings newer, surely, than anywhere else could by now achieve. There was a stillness on certain evenings, or a cast to rocks, or a design of languid branch against the sky that might be announcing glory."
This stuff just takes your breath away
They Crossed to the entrance of the Underground.... In the rush of tunnelled air they turned to stare at one another. A look two persons might exchange who, having carried an immense weight to some forlorn halt, now set it down and meet each other's eyes. Grace had come as far as she could; Ted would go down alone.
Nailed it Shirley
In modern buildings opposite the Vail house, all ground floors were doctors' offices. In the early mornings ageing men and women would arrive without breakfast to ring these doorbells."
Adam Vail gets all the best lines
"Our great and secret fear is that America may turn out to be a phenomenon, rather than a civilization. Hence, in part, the scale, the insistence, the need to prove the great mysteries obsolete or serviceable. We want our lust to be loved and called beautiful. To receive the homage due to love."
Grim Scottish childhood.
The house, which was in the Black Isle, was always cold, not only from heatlessness but from austerity. "They like it bare. Predictably enough my sister and I tend to clutter." There was only one picture in the house: "A framed photograph of the Tirpitz, which was sunk the day I was born....."
Poor Ted
In the restaurant, Ted Tice was watching Caro's lowered eyelids: the tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts."
Paul Ivory really was the villain
"It seemed incredible I couldn't get the better of them with the weapons I had—superior intelligence, good connections. Victor had—not intelligence, but a quickness. The children of brutes develop that early, trying to keep one step ahead of horror. He was clever, for instance about my play—knew exactly what was wanted when I needed help with speech or responses. There were no ideas in him, just this astuteness. But he put an immoderate value on his intelligence, because of the set he'd come from. Offspring of brutes have that in common with the children of affluence—they have no context for assessing their limitations"
Oh Grace...
"At first, there is something you expect of life, Later, there is what life expects of you. By the time you realise these are the same, it can be too late for expectations." What we are being, not what we are to be. They are the same thing.
June 12, 2020
Rating: 4.5🍌
First published in 1980, Shirley Hazzard's THE TRANSIT OF VENUS was rediscovered by the literary public after the success of her 2003 novel THE GREAT FIRE. That latter novel is still on my TBR list, but I can't imagine it can be much better than TRANSIT, which is in my opinion one of the better novels of the past 50 years. The novel traces the lives of Caroline and Grace Bell, two orphaned sisters who accompany their older half-sister to England from their native Australia in the 1950s. There, Grace meets Christian Thrale, an aspiring bureaucrat (if such a thing exists) and the son of a well-known astronomer; she and Caroline move into the Thrale residence and are soon joined for the summer by Ted Tice, a young astronomer who has come to consult with Christian's father. The effects of that summer reverberate over the next three decades as we follow (mostly) Caroline and Grace through marriages and continents. Along the way, Hazzard explores themes such as class, the role of women in the mid-20th century, power in relationships, and the divide between the Old and New Worlds (especially Australia/England and England/US). In these -- especially her interest in the Old World/New World divide -- there are strong echoes of Henry James.
Though the novel's setup may not sound especially unusual, the reading experience certainly is. The prose, also reminiscent of James, is Hazzard's own: wry, syntactically unexpected, occasionally dense but (almost) never ambiguous. Virtually every page has a line that demands to be read aloud to whoever is sitting nearby. The structure matches the excellence of the prose, with Hazzard scattering clues to a narrative puzzle throughout the text that readers must put together themselves in the book's final pages. The effect, once realized, is devastating, but lest you think the book relies on a Sixth Sense-like trick to work: the first time I read it, years ago, I completely missed the puzzle of the ending and still placed it in the pantheon of my all-time favorite books. Only upon a second reading did I fully realize the structural genius of the book.
The book is very nearly perfect in my estimation, and the only reason I docked a half-star is a late misstep when Hazzard takes her characters to America -- here was the only place where the tone and dialogue was distinctly "off" and jarring (ironic considering early in the novel one character, a writer, declares he wants to go to America so that he can capture the American style of speaking in the way Americans are so successful at capturing the British manner). But it is a minor defect in what is otherwise a masterful novel.
First published in 1980, Shirley Hazzard's THE TRANSIT OF VENUS was rediscovered by the literary public after the success of her 2003 novel THE GREAT FIRE. That latter novel is still on my TBR list, but I can't imagine it can be much better than TRANSIT, which is in my opinion one of the better novels of the past 50 years. The novel traces the lives of Caroline and Grace Bell, two orphaned sisters who accompany their older half-sister to England from their native Australia in the 1950s. There, Grace meets Christian Thrale, an aspiring bureaucrat (if such a thing exists) and the son of a well-known astronomer; she and Caroline move into the Thrale residence and are soon joined for the summer by Ted Tice, a young astronomer who has come to consult with Christian's father. The effects of that summer reverberate over the next three decades as we follow (mostly) Caroline and Grace through marriages and continents. Along the way, Hazzard explores themes such as class, the role of women in the mid-20th century, power in relationships, and the divide between the Old and New Worlds (especially Australia/England and England/US). In these -- especially her interest in the Old World/New World divide -- there are strong echoes of Henry James.
Though the novel's setup may not sound especially unusual, the reading experience certainly is. The prose, also reminiscent of James, is Hazzard's own: wry, syntactically unexpected, occasionally dense but (almost) never ambiguous. Virtually every page has a line that demands to be read aloud to whoever is sitting nearby. The structure matches the excellence of the prose, with Hazzard scattering clues to a narrative puzzle throughout the text that readers must put together themselves in the book's final pages. The effect, once realized, is devastating, but lest you think the book relies on a Sixth Sense-like trick to work: the first time I read it, years ago, I completely missed the puzzle of the ending and still placed it in the pantheon of my all-time favorite books. Only upon a second reading did I fully realize the structural genius of the book.
The book is very nearly perfect in my estimation, and the only reason I docked a half-star is a late misstep when Hazzard takes her characters to America -- here was the only place where the tone and dialogue was distinctly "off" and jarring (ironic considering early in the novel one character, a writer, declares he wants to go to America so that he can capture the American style of speaking in the way Americans are so successful at capturing the British manner). But it is a minor defect in what is otherwise a masterful novel.
April 7, 2020
Dense, rich, mature, tragic. There’s a heaviness to this book, an emotional weight that’s rare, and it had an appalling effect on me. It can almost be described as an emotional horror story, where hard-hearted life itself is the slow killer. There’s a lot to say about it, and I’m still processing, so most of my thoughts will go unaired here. But if you want to sink your teeth into something gorgeous, by a writer whose psychological insight is beyond, just superhuman, then make sure you read this novel one day, when the time’s right. Recently I’ve been thinking more than usual about the very nature of literary fiction, and this book has brought home to me the fact that it is not a term to be defined, but an experience to be surrendered to – not to be explained, though we can keep trying. This thing was shaped and designed by a superior intelligence and aesthete. That’s all I want, really: to be blown away by the special mind of an artist. It took me a bit of time in the beginning to find my feet, but after the first couple of chapters I felt myself settling in and it became more readable. Despite my overall appreciation, I was frustrated by the affair between the characters Caroline and Paul. It was so cliched, but it was interesting that it was purposely so. I’m not sure why. I think maybe Hazzard might be insisting that so much of the manufactured, the created intensities and high drama, the unreality of love stories in literature may seem fanciful, but are no less rightful, legitimate. Life is full of chaos and accident but it doesn’t have to explain itself, so why should literature? Anyway my frustration was a matter of personal taste and attitude: I’m not that interested in certain kinds of romance stories in fiction. But regardless, this novel is glorious, dense with brilliant one-liners on almost every one of its 337 pages. This thing is a dark disturbing beauty.
April 30, 2008
Brilliant, gorgeous, searing--one of my new (and rare) gold standards.
As others have noted, this is worth sticking with (I actually tried the first few chapters last year and wasn't caught by them, but had no trouble this time). And there comes a point in the latter third that's a bit of a slog. The reward of Hazzard's prose throughout, though, is worth it; her descriptions and observations are amazing, so smart and perfectly, often devastatingly, wrought. It's no mean feat to be able to pull readers into the minds and under the skin of characters the way she does here, while also managing a truly unique omniscient narrative voice--to those who hold that only macho males can pull of the knowing, confident, god-like authorial point of view, I say, pah!--Hazzard can swing with the best of them.
And yes, there is that ending, not to be spoiled here. Masterfully done--masterfully manipulated, in the way only great writers can do, so that it seems inevitable. In this case it's also devastating (this is an epic love story, after all). How often do you read one of those that's as smart as this?
As others have noted, this is worth sticking with (I actually tried the first few chapters last year and wasn't caught by them, but had no trouble this time). And there comes a point in the latter third that's a bit of a slog. The reward of Hazzard's prose throughout, though, is worth it; her descriptions and observations are amazing, so smart and perfectly, often devastatingly, wrought. It's no mean feat to be able to pull readers into the minds and under the skin of characters the way she does here, while also managing a truly unique omniscient narrative voice--to those who hold that only macho males can pull of the knowing, confident, god-like authorial point of view, I say, pah!--Hazzard can swing with the best of them.
And yes, there is that ending, not to be spoiled here. Masterfully done--masterfully manipulated, in the way only great writers can do, so that it seems inevitable. In this case it's also devastating (this is an epic love story, after all). How often do you read one of those that's as smart as this?
Displaying 1 - 30 of 873 reviews