Rereading: The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard
Originally published in The Times: Rereading: The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard
There are splashy novels that turn one briefly into the Ancient Mariner, grabbing fellow fans to quote bits at and discuss endings before quickly forgetting the reason for your love. And then there are others, quieter, more powerful, that leave one stunned and thoughtful as if an entire world has been compressed into a snow globe. These novels, of course, are often overlooked. Shirley Hazzard isn’t widely known. I suspect she might have preferred it that way.
Hazzard had no interest in happy endings or comeuppances. That her fiction is so unbelievably good, yet unfamous, is in keeping with her view of life: nothing is fair, or predictable, and life can only be comprehended in calm retrospection. As if written by a tenser Iris Murdoch, or a tanned, frisky Anita Brookner, her novels are miracles of tight, subtle, allusive prose in which drama — loss, death, lust — bursts into the lives of its protagonists without warning “like a torpedo or a crocodile”. These sudden disasters and illogical loves derail them; only later, looking back, do they glimpse how and why.
When Hazzard, an Australian who settled in New York, died in 2016 aged 85, she had produced only four novels; the third, The Transit of Venus (1980), was hailed as a masterpiece, as was her last, The Great Fire, published 23 years later. But it is her underappreciated second, The Bay of Noon (1970), that is the best introduction to her work. It is the deceptively tranquil-seeming story of young and pretty Jenny, at the point when, as she puts it, “I came to my senses,” and her future was transformed.
When we meet Jenny, her past clouded by unspecified pain, we know only that she has been evacuated halfway across the world, then, “breathlessly polite”, sent as a lowly Nato translator to Italy in the years soon after the Second World War. She arrives in a Naples much stranger than that of Elena Ferrante, where “nothing [is] in moderation” and its “volcanic extravagance” is spiced with imminent catastrophe: lava, history, feud, passion.
Stunned by the squalid beauty of a city “perpetually under bombardment” and her self-consciousness, foreignness and cluelessness, Jenny begins to work for, then possibly fall for, the playfully noncommittal Justin while befriending the beautiful Giaconda, whose first love died and who is entangled with Gianni: unbearable and narcissistic, but sometimes, confusingly, kind. This makes it sound ridiculous, a Twelfth Nightian spirograph of love, but in this apparent chaos lies its power.
Jenny’s story is bookended by random acts of destruction. Along the way the complications of wrong and painful love, coincidence and accident pile upon and distort each other so the ultimate shapes of its characters’ lives seem like woodgrain, inevitable and surprising. Hazzard’s genius is partly in her dovetailing of global cataclysm with small tragedies, while she dissects every fibre of domestic emotion, each accretion, hesitation and repudiation.
After war, everyone is a casualty. Aged 16, Hazzard she visited Hiroshima, two years after the bomb. The pulverised remains of the city “was violence visible”. But her disastrous, unhappily married parents showed her how peacetime trauma forms us too. She developed a thrilling talent for combining small horrors with ordinary life: a falling house façade or a sleeping pill in wine; broken glass ignored by dancers; “Gianni swam beneath us, monstrous in a rubber mask.”
Like her fellow Italy resident Natalia Ginzburg, Hazzard, who settled on Capri in the early 1970s, is drily funny, stylish and ferociously observant, whether about the bathos of shops selling “nylon sponges [and] plastic Bambis” in dizzyingly beautiful streets or her supporting cast: a sister-in-law’s domineering optimism; a colonel’s glare so nakedly self-revealing that “out of common humanity, one could only look away”. But what makes her characters unforgettable is their continual destabilisation by psychological and culture shock, geographical tumult and relentless uncertainty, creating a chaos in which “anything can happen”. And it does.
Apparently casually, 19 pages into the novel, Jenny explains that she moved to Naples because “I was in love with my brother”. Then, being Hazzard, the novel moves on quite calmly. All the huge events of her fiction are glimpsed, but not dwelt upon; it is their reverberations that are more singular and therefore indescribable: “How will we explain it to anyone, when we get out of here?”
This is another aspect of her genius: her understanding of how the unexplainable becomes part of us. Most of The Bay of Noon describes Jenny’s coming of age, but it’s the frame that is so impressive from a novelist’s point of view. Towards the end the adult Jenny waits for her husband in a suburban tearoom, and we are almost as shocked as she is when Justin reappears, his importance suddenly obvious. “I lowered my head over your name, Justin, at last.”
Is Hazzard read less than she should be because she was a middle-class, Tennyson-quoting woman? Because, born in Australia and an honorary resident of Capri, she lived in too many places to earn loyalty? Because she dared to write about the calamity of war, albeit at a distance? I think her unsentimental coolness is often mistaken for passionlessness, her disasters for melodrama. I doubt she would care; she was interested in the intensity of human existence, not in its noise, and that’s what makes her spectacular.
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