The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

On any day of the year Grace Thrale might be smiled at in the street by an elderly couple or by some young mother herding her noisy brood: saluted, that is, as a kindred spirit. Caroline Bell never attracted this delectable complicity. There were times when Grace wished the world were not so sure of her, so confident that boredom had claimed her. Yet in her daily existence feared the smallest deviation form habit as an interruption that might bring chaos. Grace no more wanted adventure than Dora wanted peace. She did not convince herself, as some women do, that she retained capacity for a wholly different existence ruled by exalted and injurious passions: Grace knew perfectly how the practised conformity of her days gratified her own desires. Yet one might cling to security and still be bored by it. In its first appeal, security offered an excitement almost like romance; but that rescue might wear down, like any other.

Grace and Caroline Bell are sisters from Australia, and orphans, whose parents have died in a ferry accident. By the time The Transit of Venus begins they have already been shuffled off to England, looked after by their depressive aunt Dora and an astronomer named Sefton Thrale. Caro is the beautiful one, the one who enchants; Grace is beautiful, too, but a more practical and everyday kind of beauty. She marries quickly, to Sefton's son Christian, a bland bureaucrat who offers stability and security. It's Caro that sweeps Ted Tice, a junior astronomer who arrives to work with Sefton Thrale, off of his feet, sparking an ardor that he will cherish and nurse all of his life. He tells Caro he will meet any requirement, but Ted's unwavering loyalty is not that kind of love that Caro is looking for; she drifts instead to Paul Ivory, a playwright and rake who is, in addition to being kind of a jerk, married. Her affair with Paul flowers and dies, and eventually she marries another bureaucrat, an American, but Ted's love survives even this marriage, survives her husband.

Is Ted pathetic or heroic? You can't say he's a romantic, really, except in the narrowest sense. His love resembles a train, something set on a track from which it can never be moved. We learn late in the novel that, in the very beginning of Caro's relationship with Paul, Ted learned a terrible secret about Paul, one that could have destroyed his life. Though Ted might have used this secret to his advantage, he never does, and perhaps this is the final statement about love as virtue: it's Ted alone, in the novel, whose love seems not like a kind of self-gratification. His abasement before Caro may not seem dignified, but it is love, and perhaps the purest kind. The Transit of Venus follows the two sisters in their separate lives, growing older, having affairs or merely fantasizing about them, having kids. Ted is kept off the page for long stretches, but it seems to me that his love for Caro forms the novel's spine and gives it a kind of shape. It's always there, lurking in the background.

I really enjoyed the writing in The Transit of Venus, which is lush, luxurious, and full of sharp detail. It's the kind of book that forces you to go slow; skip over a line and you run the risk of having missed the key to something. But I wasn't sure about the whole of the novel. It strikes me as one of those books where every page works, but the whole feels like it's lacking something. I never felt like Caro or Grace resolved into a psychological whole, or even a collection of traits that added up to something terribly interesting. (Caro, I think, is one of those characters who are magnetic and charismatic because they are magnetic and charismatic; we are asked to take Ted's love as a kind of credit on her personality.) The novel's attempts to situate its characters in a post-World War II Anglosphere--Australia, Britain, Canada--struck me as sort of half-baked and unpersuasive.

Here's the thing that annoyed me the most: the way The Transit of Venus waits until the end of the novel for a "big reveal" that's supposed to recontextualize the entire thing. To explain it, I have to give a spoiler alert. But here's what happens, more or less: Paul Ivory, years after their affair, confesses to Caro that he had affairs with men as well as women. He was being blackmailed by a lover whom, in a strange incident, he let drown. This is the secret that Ted Tice, having seen Paul and the lover--on the bank of a river that Paul soon learns is downstream of a broken dam, about which he does not warn the blackmailer--could hold over Paul if he wanted to. Paul's affair with Caro is a way of striking back at Ted Tice, who never even struck first. This is all very interesting in the way it makes us reconsider Ted, and confirms our worst ideas about Paul, but I found the "reveal" inorganic and wedged in, and very strange in the context of a book that is otherwise mostly bare of "incident." It felt cheap and a little condescending. Worse is the very ending of the book, in which Caro finally accepts Ted's love, only to board an airplane that immediately crashes, leading to Ted's suicide. We are asked to read between the lines to pick up these details: Hazzard tells us 100 pages previous that Caro's ophthalmologist will die in a plane crash en route to Rome, then Caro sees him on the plane. I thought this ending rather lame, and I found the suggestion that I was supposed to piece it together kind of stupid. I liked the book a little better, actually--for its richness, its depiction of the ebb and flow of ordinary lives--before I pieced it together.