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

I was charged with the placing of flagged pins on a map, each pin representing a merchant ship and the map being that of Far Eastern waters. The ships voluntarily gave their positions at regular intervals for this purpose, and the idea was to maintain a convenient daily record of the disposition of merchant shipping in the area. (44)

The narrator fails in this task, neglecting to keep the pins up to date, a neglect she ascribes “not [to] indolence but [to] commonsense,” and she is disgraced in the face of a serious attack on one of the boats that has been neglected on her map; she is subsequently relegated to “chalk[ing], in red and blue crayon on a different map, the daily gains and losses of the civil war” (44). The infantilisation enacted here characterises not only the office in which she works but the entire colonial military-economic enterprise.

The spy story recounted is risible in its particulars. The narrator, aged sixteen, is asked to spy on a member of the British community by going to stay at his house in Canton for the weekend. The visit is arranged through channels of complete propriety—the suspect’s wife is a friend of the narrator’s family—and the visit, when it transpires, is remarkable only for its utter banality, to the point of tedium; with nothing to do and no one to spy on, the narrator spends her time lying around the house reading Rebecca. In place of the high drama of espionage, readers are offered a narrative subterfuge: the double manoeuvre of disclosure and deception seen in more complete form in Transit’s prolepsis, signalled here by the passing of the copy of Rebecca from hostess to guest. In the course of the weekend, the narrator is swamped by a sense of compounded failure and juvenile entrapment, confined to a “hot little bed” next to Mrs Jarvis’s own:

It was strange to be going to sleep at ten o’clock in the very heart of that most sleepless of cities, stranger still to be camped, as it were, in this immaculate clearing of a man-made jungle. While the city fought for its jostling, noisy, desperate existence, Mrs Jarvis and I sat up in our white beds reading, the fan turned off lest we catch—unlikely