Shirley Hazzard has the presence of a prima ballerina now in retirement. She is graceful and charming, with a delicate beauty, but there is a strong hint of intellectual discipline developed over a lifetime. She has a trick of looking up at you shyly and smiling complicitly as she delivers a particularly crafted bon mot to test one’s willingness to engage with her.

One of Hazzard’s themes as a novelist is the displacement in the modern era of humanity from its rootedness, but in this stunning setting, about which she has written in The Bay of Noon (1970) and Greene on Capri (2000), she gives the impression that the bay is her sacred site, though she moves frequently between Italy and New York. She is immensely erudite and knows Neapolitan history intimately. She retells an incident from Tacitus that occurred at nearby Pozzuoli when the Emperor Augustus, in a moment of rare compassion, saved a slave from the vindictive anger of his owner. On the evidence of her fiction, such moments of grace are special for her.

Hazzard is of that valuable genus in fiction: an explorer of contemporary ethical dilemmas. Yet her oeuvre begins with a depiction of the unpredictability of desire. In her first novel, The Evening of the Holiday (1966), the central figure, Sophie, is slowly drawn to Tancredi during a hot Tuscan summer. Sophie recognises that he is trouble, but Hazzard depicts in cool prose the stages of their involvement from the moment Tancredi glimpses Sophie’s naked arm dipping into a Tuscan fountain. There is a sense, which runs through all her fiction, of the non-conformist perversity of love. At a subtle allegorical level, Tancredi is Italy, foreignness, the Other, in all its attractive ambiguity and duplicity. Henry James is clearly an influence, particularly on the willingness of her prose to pursue complex relations and states of being against the conventions of syntax. It is a style that also glows with aphorisms, with the delight of suddenly coming out of the snares of ambiguous human behaviour into a clearing. ‘Beauty,’ she says, quoting Flaubert, ‘is precious because it renders truth of a very difficult kind.’

Desire and its consequences occupy the major novels. Caro Bell, the expatriate heroine of The Transit of Venus (1980), performs a rite of passage that reaches from Sydney during the war years to the postwar stringencies of London. Caro and her sister, Grace, are offered forms of love that subtly define moral positions or, better still, modes of authentic activity. The dialectical arrangement of these relationships is evocative of Jane Austen’s themes of tension between heart and head, between social responsibility and love.

Hazzard also points out the influence of Thomas Hardy, particularly in the early chapters. There are references to the Brontës in the depiction of an amoral but attractive male. Caro Bell recognises that ‘there are dying conditions as well as living conditions. Venus can blot out the sun.’ Hazzard remarks that many commentators have interpreted the title of her most recent novel as an emblem of the cataclysm that befell civilisation during the twentieth century: the two world wars, the holocausts in Europe and Asia, the destruction of Hiroshima, which she saw at first hand soon after war’s end. But its obverse significance is the medieval ideal of the restorative fire of love. One cannot rediscover oneself, she believes, without discovering love.

I asked Hazzard how consciously these novels retrace details of her autobiography. She was born in Sydney, has an elder sister like Grace Bell. The lure of Britain took her to London at war’s end, where she saw the extent of the Blitz. Cities were rebuilding. But individuals had to rebuild the self. Soon she was in the Far East, whose specific details she re-creates in The Great Fire (2003). In Hong Kong, she was engaged by British Intelligence to monitor the civil war in China, just as Leith is commissioned to do by a mysterious French officer. She has also lived in New Zealand and the US, where for ten years she worked for the United Nations Secretariat. In 1963 she married the writer and Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller.

Of the autobiographical echoes, she points out that her aim is not to retrace the map of her life but rather to reclaim ‘dispersed mental states’, and in that sense her fictions are subtle historical novels. They replicate in various ways the project that Aldred Leith is given by his French general. Of the brilliantly evocative passages describing Japan and Hong Kong in the aftermath of the war, she confessed that she knew almost at once in 1947 that she would write about the Far East’s languor, garishness, frenetic activity and sense of fatalism, but had to wait more than fifty years to do so.

She is more dismissive of her years at the UN, which she has written about both in fiction and non-fiction (including Defeat of an Ideal, 1973): ‘It was and still is an ineffective conglomeration run by a Secretariat that was distinguished by its bumbling incompetence, its analytical ineptitudes and by its corruption in high places.’

In the face of such disintegration, both intimate and public, what then are the values that prevail? In the Boyer lectures of 1985 (published under the title Coming of Age in Australia), the most commonly repeated quality is that of ‘decency’. If in the Depression years during which she was nurtured Australians were largely innocent, there was an innate sense of social support and of doing the right thing. The power play of nations might be rebarbative, but the individual lived by a set of inherent values.

Hazzard’s female protagonists swim in the great fire. Her central male figures are emblems of decency. Desire, the reclamation of values out of destruction and decency, each of these elements comes together in The Great Fire. She writes that: ‘In the wake of so much death the necessity to assemble life became both urgent and oppressive.’ This necessity is epitomised, in the first instance, by Leith’s mission to document the end of a way of life in the war-ravaged lands: that is, to bear witness. Viewing the destruction of London and attempts to reclaim it, Leith decides that: ‘As war was ending he had intended to create for himself a fixed point, some center from which departures might be made.’

A number of times in conversation, Hazzard quoted admiringly from Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech that the more the Soviet régime victimised its citizens the more chance there was of someone surviving to bear witness. The relationship between Leith and the Australian war crimes prosecutor Peter Exley, while not a recreation, is reminiscent of the friendship between Pierre Bezuhov and Andrei Bolkonsky – emblems of heart and mind – in War and Peace. Tolstoy’s masterpiece about historical cataclysm is the unnamed book both men are reading when they meet.

Leith has been scarred by the fire of war and is now annealed by his illicit love for the sixteen-year-old Helen Driscoll. The unconventional nature of this affair leads naturally to talk of Hazzard’s treatment of Helen’s parents, the violent Barry Driscoll and his corrosive wife, Melba. Hazzard has been criticised, particularly by Brenda Niall in ABR (February 2004), for the recidivist depiction of Australians in her novels as post-colonial vulgarians, as contrasts to the kind of ethical refinement she hyperbolises. In The Great Fire, she refers to Australia as ‘the great southern wound’. She is at some pains to point out that she writes principally about the Australia of her youth. But the analysis is acerbic: ‘a country where sameness is a virtue; instinctive derision for the distinctive; a place where material comfort displaces culture.’ She describes the trial of Dobell in 1944 for the Joshua Smith portrait as one of the compelling causes for her leaving the country.

But she points out that this is the artesian basin of memory from which she draws her fiction and that on subsequent visits she has marked crucial changes, chief of which is multiculturalism and the engagement with Asia. The continuing source of cultural septicaemia remains White Australia’s official reluctance to address and reconcile with its appalling history. The novels are retrievals of dispersed mental states therefore valid as imaginative truths. The Driscolls and other such fictional figures are legitimate literary tropes for her attack on imaginative sterility, the antithesis of those open to love.

It is on love and remembrance that the conversation concludes. Hazzard reminds us that the following day is Francis Steegmuller’s birthday. He has been dead for ten years, and a friend had suggested that it was time to forget grief and pick up her life: ‘Why,’ she insists, ‘should I want to forget?’ Painful as it often is, lost love remains a source of inspiration. And movingly, in Latin, she quotes Catullus’s little elegy for the dead wife of his friend Calvus: ‘If Calvus, effects of grief can affect those silent sepulchres of old loves and spent friendships / lamented and evoked in our desire, her untimely death will never grieve Quintilia half so much as gladness for your love.’

Remembrance, keeping faith and love. Essential values for an astonishing writer.