Hazzard's characters get "tangled" in history, their personal lives snarled or braided in its net. She buries the sprawling abstract formalism of the book, so reminiscent of the ancient tragedians and the old stories of Hardy and George Eliot, her literary forebearers, beneath a shimmering surface of immediacy. The novel makes its transit through lines and stars through the inner spaces of loneliness and passion.
THIS IS THE ARTISTIC BEAUTY of Hazzard's style; an elegant and controlled prose that, carefully dispassionate and particular, nevertheless evokes an atmosphere of intense emotion. The writing is clean, sharp, and brilliantly metaphorical, with a tendency toward hesitation and qualification, a beautiful refinement of diction that results in poetic prose.
There is always this balance between the wholly familiar in style, action, and observation, and the weight and concentration of huge, abstract, and emotional circles of magical and tragic resonance. Even ordinary details bring waves of meaning and inferences, while remaining easily acessible:
When Paul Ivory walked in espadrilles on the paths and passages of Peverel, the sound inaugurated, softly, the modern era. As did his cotton jerseys--some blue, some black--and trousers of pale poplin. The modern era, like the weather, was making these things possible.
The book glows, holographic, with an unearthly halo, so that the precise details of lemon groves and white walls, dirty linoleum stairs, and blue velvet all hold the threat of profound poetry.
Like a poet, she understands the grave magic of our unconscious life. The compelling, almost occult narration of Ted Tice's inspection of the Wasteland of Hiroshima exemplifies this style. The scientist's fate "became equivocal and ceased to make quite clear if he would win or fail" as he toured the atomic ruins, she writes, while his "imagination stalked ahead, aghast, among sight soon to be outdone." Shedding light on the bizarre truth of our inner, irrational metaphors, she presents this vision of a city unnaturally demolished to expose the contours of the earth, leaving only "a single monument, defabricated girders of an abolished dome, presiding like a vacant cranium or a hollowing out of the great globe itself: Saint Peter's in some eternal city of nightmare."
A story of such world-ranging pathos as Transit of Venus might be expected to lapse into the trite romantic-melodrama that fills airport book racks. But Hazzard errs infrequently. She makes sentimental slips in directing the plot; but they remain only minor errors, like those of other great writers, short detours from her delicate discipline.
Still, a graver defect alienates us from the story at times. Hazzard suffers a cultural manneredness that sometimes overwhelms the pleasure we take in the novel's intelligent style. Occasionally we detect pretentiousness, a conscious literacy, an assumed intellectual and artistic sophistication. Allusions to literature, paintings, sculptures, mythology, and the great, exotic places of the world abound, and while we enjoy this armchair journey, Hazzard cannot always assimilate it into the flow; it becomes unfortunate, irksome baggage. She establishes Caro Bell, the Australian heroine, as a charming and sensitive woman, but Caro's literary cultivation seems incongruously elevated from what Hazzard has told us of her education. Her expansive knowledge seems artificially constructed by her cosmopolitan creator.
Yet, in an intriguing way, even these flaws contribute to making this an "important" book. The Transit of Venus upholds the continuum of "great literature." While it is brilliantly modern and engrossing for our age, it appeals to the problems of life, to our steadier thoughts, and to the timeless mysticism of a story well told. Far more than a museum piece, it retains a seriousness and dignity beyond most contemporary fiction.