 A Reader’s TransitbyPaul Clark The edition of The Transit of Venus (1980) by Shirley Hazzard that I own is a hardcover first edition that I bought years ago, though I never cracked the spine of it until this week. I bought it because I had long ago given away or lost a beloved mass market edition of Hazzard’s novel, published in the early 1980s by none other than the Playboy Press. Now, in the early 1980s, Playboy Press was a very small part of the Playboy empire. If memory serves (which it doesn’t always these days) the Playboy Press catalog featured books on making drinks, or collections of dirty jokes. Somehow, however, it got the rights to two of Shirley Hazzard’s novels, including The Transit of Venus, which won the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award.  It took me the longest time to find an image of the cover of the Playboy Press version of the book. All I could remember was that it had a tasteful drawing of a woman, unlike all the other covers with women in the Playboy Press catalog. Some effective Google searching by the proprietors of BiblioBuffet turned up the image that appears above. It is much less provocative than the cover of the current edition of the paperback. My other memory of first reading The Transit of Venus 25 years ago is that when I finished I turned back to page one and read it again, I was so moved by Hazzard’s voice and the images she created. I had these memories in mind when I re-read the book this week, only to discover that I had forgotten almost everything about the book except the deadly storm that opens it and the ominous departure of an airplane that ends it.This was a bit disturbing. If I remembered the act of reading and re-reading so well, why (or perhaps “how” is a better interrogatory) had I forgotten almost everything about the book? Perhaps I read it so long ago that the plot and characters were pushed out of consciousness by all the other books I read since then (although there are a lot of other books I read at the same time that have stuck with me). I imagine there must be something about Hazzard’s lyrical style that made the novel root looser in my consciousness than some others with more vividly drawn characters or rousing plot. Memory is a trick of the mind, in any event. Who knows why we remember for decades a trivial incident that happened in a flash, but can’t remember the name of a neighbor’s wife you’ve known for years? For avid readers, the sheer number of books read over a lifetime means that many books will likely be pushed out of memory. The good thing about this is that a novel read long ago like The Transit of Venus can be enjoyed as if this reading was for the first time. The center of Hazzard’s novel is the story of two sisters—Caroline (known as Caro) and Grace Bell, who as young woman have moved from Australia to England after their parents died when a ferry capsized. The novel covers a period from the 1950s to the 1980s. It opens with Grace on the verge of marrying Christian Thrale, a marriage that will provide her with a safe if ultimately unsatisfying life. Caro eschews the safety of marriage, at least initially, for short though tempestuous affairs. At the opening of the novel we also meet Ted Tice, a young astronomer who has come to the Thrale household to work with Christian’s father, an eminent astronomer. Tice and the senior Thrale are working on a project to place a telescope somewhere in Europe that will help in the tracking of celestial phenomena such as the one described in the title of the book. The transit of the planet Venus across the sun, from the viewpoint of the Earth, is something that happens with determinable, if infrequent, regularity. Throughout the 25-year course of the novel, the two sisters—as well as their lovers (requited and otherwise), relations, and friends—make many transits across the face of . . . well, I’m hard pressed to explain what would replace the image of the sun in this comparison. The best I can come up with is that Hazzard tracks the transit of her characters across the face of love, one of the oldest stories in literature. Grace, who marries safely at the beginning, is never quite content with her choice. Caro, who is less content with safe choices, never fully opens herself to the one who loves her most, until perhaps it is too late. The other characters, like satellites around the sisters’ trajectory, find themselves making (or not making) decisions based on where the sisters are in their lives. Early in the novel, Ted Tice reveals a secret to Caro, an act of omission on his part that dates back to World War II. Caro reflects that perhaps Tice and the subject of his secret might meet again some day. Tice says, “I’ve thought that too. I’ve thought there may be more collisions of the kind in life than in books. 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.” Throughout the course of the book, Hazzard’s characters will continually cross paths, even as the story moves from England to New York to South America and points across Europe. Historical touchpoints within the novel’s timeline—the Vietnam War, the changing role of women in the workplace, even the dawning of the AIDS age—are part of the backdrop of the plot. But, above all else, what Hazzard is tracking is her characters search for fulfillment with the “other.” It is a sad tale, since that search, for so many, remains futile. (Many thanks to Lidia of Legendary Assets for her image of the Playboy Press edition.) Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he sometimes writes for pleasure, though he keeps these writings under a bushel, and the bushel he keeps in a dark shed outdoors. Paul co-wrote a humor column called “Loose Canons” for the late, lamented Readerville Journal. He recently purged the majority of his books from his shelves. Over a series of essays, he will write about the books that remain and why they are important to him. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it |