Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist B ...

The magisterial take on the land, creating the fantastic spaces of colonial desire, is reiterated—indeed, enacted—by Constantin in his brutal treatment of the much younger Elizabeth, who is in love with him, forcing her to walk beyond her desire or endurance without water or sympathy. His antagonism is supported by the literal colonial grasp of the island in its nomenclature whereby geography is rendered “combative, ballistic: Magazine, Repulse. It was a fact, universal, of colonial life” (30). Here Hazzard’s readers are firmly in the terrain of her biography; this is another version of Helen Driscoll’s story, and Elizabeth is young, in love, living in Hong Kong, and working briefly for Combined Services Intelligence – another protagonist of whose life Hazzard’s own may well have been a “carbon copy”. Thus the story brings the resistant matter of colonial geography to bear on the biographical passage from Antipodes to metropolis, generating a perspective unconfined—although not untouched—by colonial tropes. The congruence of Constantin’s brutality towards the narrator and the colonial landscape onto which that brutality is displaced anticipates by reversal the traumatic separation of Hazzard’s mature narratives, and limns the apparent “happy ending” (Crawford 9) of The Great Fire in particular.

These colonial tropes are brought to bear on the interior spaces of “Canton More Far,” which also presents a displaced and substitutive family scene, produced by the breaching of geographical boundaries. Narrative attention here shifts, through the mechanism of espionage, from the colonial East of Hong Kong to a China that is compellingly present and in the process of being created through urban vitality and the political impress of civil war, a shift to be reiterated and meticulously annotated in The Great Fire. Espionage, the practice of border crossing, involves the veiling of reticence in disclosure, the working of expressive language against itself to create parallel and substitutive worlds and vistas, which dominate this account. These parallel worlds inflect, moreover, the story’s narrative subjectivity, once again told in the first person and tied explicitly to Hazzard’s biography in that it tells a story she has herself frequently recounted as her own. “Canton More Far” opens with a moment of location,