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    The Great Fire: A City in Flames
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    The Great Fire: A City in Flames
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    The Great Fire: A City in Flames
    Audiobook52 minutes

    The Great Fire: A City in Flames

    Written by Ann Turnbull

    Narrated by Christopher Webster

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    ‘In sixteen hundred and sixty-six, London burned like rotten sticks.'

    Left alone and homeless by the Great Plague, Sam struggled to survive. He was lucky to get a job working for the Giraud family. But Andre, the son of his boss, doesn't make life easy. Then a fire breaks out on Pudding Lane. Before anyone fully realises what's happening, London's burning... and this fire can't be put out. Now it's time for Sam to prove what he's really worth. If he can get out alive...
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW. F. Howes Ltd
    Release dateJul 2, 2015
    ISBN9781510001183
    Author

    Ann Turnbull

    Ann, who lives in the Shropshire town of Telford, is best-known for her historical novels, including the Friends and Foes trilogy - of which the first book, Pigeon Summer, was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize. She has been writing since the age of six and her first book was published in 1974. Since then, more than 25 books have followed.

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    Reviews for The Great Fire

    3.5/5

    344 ratings16 reviews

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    • 3/5
      In a vague but overwhelming postwar depression studded with images of physical acedia, injury, and disease the characters haltingly seek to escape (to the past or the future?) via very romantic love. This won the National Book Award, and was nominated for my own Stage IV Oy Vey Award, but was too well-written to make the shortlist.
      The author writes in sentences that sometimes seem to have holes in them. I first thought that this was some kind of synecdoche, but it isn’t. Her writing is abstract, oblique, and peppered with poetic or odd word choices; adjectives as nouns, etc. She also likes to occasionally give her punctuation a strenuous work-out:

      By now, misery would have circulated: the dead would be named, the relatives informed; existences derailed.

      Near the book's slowly approaching ending, a character comments,

      "What a cruel story. Does everyone have a cruel story?”.

      They certainly do here, although it sometimes seems as though they both exaggerate and cherish it. I sometimes felt like the family practitioner who dealt with various mental disorders by slapping his patients and saying, Get a hold of yourself, man!
    • 3/5
      The Great Fire is a novel set in the aftermath of World War II. Aldred Leith is a thirty-two year old British officer, who is writing a book about the destruction in China and Japan and initial rebuilding efforts. Severely wounded in the European fighting, Leith has recovered sufficiently to spend months traipsing across China and is now entering Japan. There he takes quarters on the grounds of the Driscoll compound and soon befriends the young Driscoll's, Ben and Helen. Intelligent and innocent, the adolescents represent both the culture of the past and the hope for the future.Despite having been written in 2003, the novel feels like a novel of an earlier time. Frocks, gentlemen callers, and afternoons spent reading poetry make much of the action seem disembodied from the setting. Although the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are alluded to, they are never discussed. The Japanese are servants only, and there is little interaction with them, despite Leith speaking the language. Most of the action centers around the love affair between Leith and Helen, made scandalous by the fifteen year age difference. There was great potential for a book set in this time and place, but the author focuses on the domesticity of a European love story instead.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this novel a lot, not the least for reading it while living through another time when mass trauma seems to manifest itself everywhere and there is a constant awareness that things are changing, in my case in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and protest against police brutality and systemic racism. It was comforting, in an odd way, to read about characters making their way through the wreckage of world war, and choosing a path toward happiness.
    • 3/5
      I am trying not to be over-influenced by the learned voices on the cover lauding this book as a work of genius because I thought it was as dull as ditchwater. I think it’s fiction aimed at people who read books on a higher plane, where realistic dialogue is not required, and indeed nothing needs to happen from one page to the next. One can simply sit back and admire a well turned metaphor.The post-war Japan setting seemed interesting enough, and I was hoping it would have some educational value, but what we got instead was a lukewarm love story in which a guy takes a fancy to a girl practically half his age (anyone else find that distinctly icky?) despite hardly knowing eachother, and conduct a stiff courtship described by a narrative voice reminiscent of the Pathe Newsreel. There was nothing to hook the reader, no handholds, nothing. I really didn’t like it - maybe that makes me a literary philistine, but so be it.
    • 5/5
      An astonishing sojourn, I would have edited the final quarter to a degree, but it is an amazing portal.
    • 4/5
      Well written story set in japan at the end of WW2. The main character is documenting the aftermath of the war when while staying with an australian diplomat, he is conflicted by feelings for the much younger 17 year old daughter.
    • 4/5
      Beautifully written novel about a soldier after WWII. A decorated veteran, Aldred Leith 'walked' across China in the two years after the war to document a China that would be forever changed by the Chinese Civil War. He then arrives in Japan to survey the aftermath of Hiroshima, where he meets an Australian military family and falls in love with the 17-yr old daughter. The novel brilliantly describes what it must have been like to travel across the world during that time - the protagonist goes to Japan, Hong Kong, the UK and New Zealand.
    • 3/5
      Although I loved 'Transit of Venus', and still love Hazzard's language, she didn't quite know what to do with herself here. There are more loose ends than a yarn factory, and endless painfully flatlined passages. After awhile, it's hard to pay attention because you know that she's not going to USE these characters, settings, ideas. She's just moving through them, as if she were a passenger on a worldwide train. It has a listless feeling, except where the plot bursts out, (one always feels) against her will.
    • 3/5
      Irritating protagonist, book saved by glorious prose, but not a great read overall.
    • 4/5
      Shirley Hazzard and her late husband were friends with Graham Greene, and I can see shades of the latter's work in The Great Fire. I don't mean to suggest Hazzard's style is derivative, merely that she shares his talent for describing characters thrown into chaotic situations overseas. For me the scenes of foreign people and places were more interesting than Leith's unconsummated love affair; I wanted more of them. I liked the writing very much though, and I will return to this author.
    • 2/5
      The Great Fire is the story of Aldred Leith, a soldier sent to study the after effects of the bombing of Hiroshima. He connects with other British and Australian citizens during his time in Asia, notably with the teenaged Helen, with whom he falls in love.I didn't like the main character, Aldred. He was snobbish, too perfect and, to be honest, not that interesting. He might have been interesting if he'd been written in a more realistic way. His love, Helen, was also written as too perfect to be interesting.In all, this was too much like a Harlequin romance plot for my liking, with the young heroine devoted to her dying brother, the true and, for a long time, chaste love..often from afar and the moody atmosphere of post-war Asia.The writing was lyrical, the plot well executed (if you like that kind of story) but the characters were too weak to hold the book together.
    • 4/5
      This is a really amazing book, in what it doesn't say as much as for what it does! For one thing, Hazzard is a master at characterization, and she follows the rule "show, don't tell" perfectly. I can't even remember a physical description of either main character, but I feel like I'd know them anywhere based on the perceived characteristics from their actions and conversations. It's unusual that she has two main protagonists, one only slightly less important than the other. She bounces between the two seamlessly (even though my editor said it was a no-no, but of course, I'm not nearly as talented). Most of the novel revolves around China and Japan post WWII, and relates to the aftermath of Hiroshima. It's not a history book, but you do get a feel for people and places and that time.The scope of the novel is huge, and at times I wished she would have gone back and explained some of the matters that were inferred to but never resolved. There was a lot of foreshadowing of things that never happened, which was annoying at times.One main character, Aldred, is really fascinating in that he appears to be the world's most boring yet alluring man. He spends most of his time describing his many travels to two young children and in reality, that would probably be obnoxious. But here it works, for many reasons (no spoilers!). Nearing the end, however, I was kind of sick of him. He seemed a bit too magnanimous and "ideal". In all, this was an epic novel that I looked forward to reading each day. I would suggest having a map at hand before reading, just to get a feel for his travels.
    • 5/5
      In this exceptional story, Shirley Hazzard gives us the eternal story of Aldred and Helen, thrown together in the chaotic and threatening aftermath of the Second World War. He's a major in the British Army who re-upped at war's end to study the effects of war on old cultures. She is the daughter of horrid and ambitious parents and has a terminally ill brother to whom she is devoted. She's loyal, erudite, fifteen years Aldred's junior, and falls unalterably in love with him. War's fortunes and the designs of empires unfortunately separate them and put an entire world between them - he is sent back the the U.K., and Helen goes with her family to her father's new posting in New Zealand.There are several Great Fires here. One is World War II itself, and one is specifically the bombing of Hiroshima. Another is Aldred and Helen's love. Ms. Hazzard's prose comes across as reserved and cautionary, but is deeply touched by what we witness. The intellect and the heart are both deep, and deeply affected. Our author inspires awe at our renewed understanding of the power of language. Our hero Aldred is a very virtuous man. He hides his severe wounds,which are physical as well as emotional. He is aghast in the wake of war and weary in the role of occupier (his superiors assign him to a study of Hiroshima after The Bomb). His friends and colleagues see it, too: one potential rival for Helen's heart gives up the field when he comes to know Aldred better. Besides a very memorable love story, this is also the story of civilization and hope surviving cataclysm. Helen's beloved brother dies, and the cataclysm becomes close and personal. Aldred helps people in the U.K. - our author never flinches in her willingness to protray sympathetic characters - minor heroes - of either sex or any age. (The secondary characters would make a very fertile area of study.)I honor Ms. Hazzard. I recommend this piece in the highest terms possible. Would that she produced fiction more often - I will definitely be taking up her other novels. Wow.
    • 4/5
      Slow building, elegantly written taole of a British solider in Japan following World War II. Turns into a love story between the soldier and a young girl displaced by the War. Ultimately satisfying and very well written.
    • 4/5
      Shirley Hazzard's award winning novel, The Great Fire, follows the parallel lives of two men at the end of World War II - Peter Exley, an Australian living in China to investigate war crimes; and Aldred Leith, a Brit who has traveled to Japan near Hiroshima to record the effects of war on the survivors. Both men struggle to come to terms with life after war ... and the novel explores their psyches through flashbacks of memory interspersed with their adjustment back to civilian life. Of the two, Peter is the least developed character - but nonetheless, the reader empathizes with his struggle over whether to pursue a life in music or return to toil in his father's law firm.Hazzard spends more time refining the character of Aldred Leith who arrives in Japan to stay with an Australian Brigadier and his family. Brigadier Driscoll and his wife are unlikeable people who have two children - Ben and Helen. Ben, at age 20, is dying from Friedreich's Ataxia. His sister, Helen at age 17, provides the love interest for the adult Leith. The difference in their ages lends a subtle conflict to the novel. Leith's former preoccupation with his work is gradually replaced by his obsession with Helen ... and it is through this love, that he begins to understand how he will recover from the psychological effects of the war.Hazzard's writing is beautiful and hypnotic, yet at times ambiguous. Entering the world of her novel feels a bit like plunging into a vast and complicated art museum where everything must be slowly considered and the meaning is not always clear. At times I felt tranquilized by Hazzard's descriptions.This is a slowly unfolding novel - quite literary in style and phrasing. It is a novel about love and recovery from war, about friendships and the complications of family. For those readers who enjoy a gently paced story and want to be enveloped and lost in words, this one is for you.Recommended.
    • 4/5
      This novel takes place after the conclusion of the Second World War. The protagonist (who was a minor hero in the British army) has just spent two years traveling around China, gathering data to write a book. He comes to Japan after his journey and meets Ben and Helen, two Austrailian youths (they are brother and sister). Ben has a degenerative illness and is nearing death. Helen is his primary caretaker, and both brother and sister are well-read and well-spoken; the siblings create an oasis from the conformity of the military that the protagonist, Leith, indulges in. Leith and Helen fall in love, despite the differences in their ages, the disapproval of Helen's parents, and other factors. The remainder of the novel describes primarily how Leith and Helen function in the aftermath of the war and how they deal with the obstacles and other relationships in their lives so that they can be together.Although I suppose the romace between Helen and Leith is the plot-driving force of the novel, there really isn't any discernible action. I did not get a good feel as to why the two characters fell in love (I was actually suspecting that by the end one or both characters would decide that their relationship was a brief flame that must be extinguished due to circumstances). Although I think the plot was lacking, the author's writing style was intersting and lovely. It took me a little while to become accustomed to her voice (it switches from first to third person regularly and sometimes, mid-sentence), but I wound up loving it - it caught the kind of ethereal beauty of the environment and the characters. Hazzard uses a sort of stream-of-conciousness style, but not so very vague or unstructured as that term implies. I think Hazzard did a great job with the characterization of Leith but left us intrigued about the other characters - we needed more (especially Helen, although she may have been left purposefully vague because the character was young and unformed as yet, and also to give a sense of the aura that enraptured Leith). I was disappointed in the novel - I thought it was building to some sort of action or climax, and I did not feel that it achieved that (although this could be just my reading-need for a climax and not a fault of the novel). I think Hazzard spent quite a bit of time on other characters (Peter Exley especially) but did not integrate them in the context of the novel or provide resolution within the frame of the story.Overall, extremely and interestingly well-written; I would have liked to see a bit more plot depth.