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sebald_feedAt first, there is something you expect of life. Later, there is what life expects of you.
Shirley Hazzard’s novel The Transit of Venus (1980) is a novel I have looked forward to rereading for a long time. It’s brilliantly written, pleasantly quirky, and always keeps the forward momentum flowing. Over four decades she wrote four novels, and all of her major themes are prominent here—putting characters under a microscope, exerting nearly unbearable pressure on love, debating what it takes to have an ethical spine, and trying to move women out from under the thumb of men in both home and the public arena.
Transit follows two newly orphaned sisters and the tangled relationships they will have with the men who become their husbands, lovers, and admirers across some twenty-plus years. Caroline (Caro) and Grace Bell arrive in England as young women from Australia, anxious to restart their lives. They couldn’t be more different, and Transit is going to explore and exploit everything that sets them apart.
The most important of the male through-lines in Transit is that of Ted Tice, a young astronomer who makes a dramatic appearance on the book’s first page. A storm with devastating results has been predicted in the opening sentence.
That noon a man was walking slowly into a landscape under a branch of lightning. A frame of almost human expectancy defined this scene, which he entered from the left-hand corner. Every nerve—for even barns and wheelbarrows and things without tissue developed nerve in these moments—waited, fatalistic. Only he, kinetic, advanced against circumstances to a single destination.
Farmers moved methodically, leading animals or propelling machines to shelter. Beyond the horizon, provincial streets went frantic at the first drops. Wipers wagged on windshields, and people also charged and dodged to and fro, to and fro. Packages were bunged inside coat-fronts, newspapers upturned on new perms. A dog raced through a cathedral. Children ran in thrilling from playgrounds, windows thudded, doors slammed. Housewives were rushing, and crying out, “My washing.” And a sudden stripe of light split earth from sky.
Ted, small suitcase in hand, is walking to the house where he will start working with a famous elder astronomer, and where he will also meet the astronomer’s guests, the two Bell sisters. Grace Bell has already become engaged to the astronomer’s son, and before the evening is over, Ted will become smitten with the other sister, Caro. For most of the novel Ted will go all out to win her love, but she will turn him down repeatedly. Caro tells herself she has other standards. “There were necessities, of silence and comprehension that she valued more than love, thinking this a choice she had made.”
It is likely to go unnoticed by the reader at the time, but Hazzard foreshadows most of Transit within the first fifteen pages of the book. Each sister will marry the wrong man and will then engage in adultery as an attempt at course correction. Making the wrong choice is the way characters are tested in Hazzard’s universe. Ted, continually spurned by Caro, eventually marries, even though Caro continues to remain his North Star
The transit of Venus refers to the very rare event when Venus crosses in front of the sun, permitting astronomers (if the skies are clear!) to do measurements that help them extrapolate the distance between the Earth and both the Sun and Venus. (I’ll refer you to the Wikipedia article for precise details.) At the dinner when Ted first meets Caro, he tells a story about a transit of Venus that took place in the 18th century.
A Frenchman had traveled to India years before to observe a previous transit, and was delayed on the way by wars and misadventure. Having lost his original opportunity, he waited eight years in the East for that next transit, of 1769. When the day came, the visibility was freakishly poor, there was nothing to be seen. There would not be another transit for a century.
He was telling this to, and for, Caroline Bell.
Despite having only met Caro that day, Ted was already predicting his own fatalistic devotion to her by the middle of dinner. “His story has such nobility you can scarcely call it unsuccessful,” he added, referring both to the 18th century scientist and also, undoubtedly, to his future self.
Hazzard uses multiple weapons from her writer’s arsenal to focus our attention on her characters’ motivations and their innermost thoughts during their conversations and when they are together. Written in free indirect style, we are witness to the thoughts and micro-emotions of each of Hazzard’s main characters as they muse and interact, and when they are at decisive moments. This intimacy betrays the frequency with which characters misinterpret and mistranslate the words and actions of others, which in turn leads to bad or wrong decisions.
As is evident in the quotations I have selected, everything—the weather, the landscape, rooms, objects—conspires to even further underscore the mood of characters. For example, when Grace and Christian make up after a fight, the entire room becomes anthropomorphic: “meaning flowed slowly back, like a stain, into the cream rug; twill cushions miraculously reinflated; and a pair of Spode plates, mounted on a wall, renewed their encircling spell.”
Transit is also a novel about secrets, secrets withheld out of shame and fear. When the secrets are confessed, Caro finds that a significant part of her life had been led as a lie. Suddenly, a key part of her past had been swept away, leaving a giant gap.
Like each of the females who take the leading roles in Shirley Hazzard’s novels, Caro Bell is a richly complex character. As a young woman she is dynamic but naïve, ambitious but with just enough preconceived ideas about what she is looking for to make bad decisions.
But it is Grace who sums up their lives as they reach middle age. “At first,” Grace says, “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.”
Grace had discovered that men prefer not to go through with things. When the opposite occurred, it made history: Something you’ll always remember.
She said, “Women have to go through with things. Birth, for instance, or hopeless love. Men can evade forever.”
Near the end of the book, the two battle-scarred sisters sit together and exchange “some pain for a tragedy not exclusively theirs.” Grace has stuck out her marriage with self-satisfied, entitled Christian, despite his affairs. Caro fell passionately in love with London’s hot playwright of the moment, a married man, and had an affair with him that wounded her badly. Then she was “resurrected” by a marriage to a wealthy, but very appreciative American, except he died unexpectedly. Then, finally wishing she could see “all she had been blind to,” she is back where she began, face to face with Ted Tice. She has come to realize that he has had the ethical spine that almost no one else in the novel possessed.
Shirley Hazzard. The Transit of Venus. NY: Viking, 1980.
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