The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
A prism of language from this perfect novel:
No one could say these objects were ugly, even the crayon with the shiny red flower, for they were spread on the varnished table like flints from an age unborn.
Caroline observed that knowledge was for some a range of topics; for others, depth of perception. She yawned at her own lie, and at the orange television.
From the geometric flake of yellow light, a man was calling …
Green fell in every form, and was carried off in baskets. “They are cutting down the very color…”
Ted had for some time been studying a faint blue object, possibly a star.
…a big lilac coming out in purple pyramids
Those are the colors, which is not to speak of the form, the rhythm, the balance, the language, the intricately laid details and how they echo divinely throughout a novel about the grand and mortal scale of true love.
Here’s the story: Caroline and Grace Bell are two beautiful Australian sisters staying in an esteemed astronomer’s estate in post-war England. Grace is engaged to the astronomer’s son. Ted Tice, a visiting young scientist, arrives and is immediately taken by Caroline. Later that week a dashing young poet named Paul Ivory is also to stay at the castle; Caroline immediately sets her sights on him. We observe the transits of their love and lives over the course of the next few decades. The sepia desert at the bottom of the world gives way to the lush post-war estates at the precipice of modernity, which despite its sprawl remains beholden to the fates dictated by vigilant stars.
Alice Gregory in the New Yorker says she finished the book “always with the impression that something very real and a little beyond language has happened to me,” and I concur. I read it rapt, poised with a pencil like a good student, and walked around feeling altered, like I had unlocked a secret key to the universe.
Caro, observing Paul.
Caro wondered if he did this to women, made them talk in such a way in such a voice, with the double meanings that diminished meaning, stretching the tension-wire between man and woman to a taut, purposeless antagonism. His banter gave an unearthly feeling that you were not hearing his true voice, and that it might not even exist.
Ted, observing Caro.
Watching her, he was thinking how, in some great pictures, every particle of the light is usual, daily, and at the same time a miracle: which is no more than the precise truth […] he thought most men would hardly dare to touch her, or only with anger, because she would not pretend anything was casual. It was unflattering, what she was apparently willing to dispense with in consequence of this belief.
Observing them all, the totality of their orbit, from an object in the new millennium, I am humbled by the existence of love so sacred it takes on the scale of Earth itself — endures the opaque slaloms of circumstance, the effects of which are impossible to parse in the moment, but nevertheless yield exquisite symmetry; a perfect circle.
