The book tells of Caro and Grace Bell, Australian sisters whose parents have drowned in a Sydney ferry sinking, and who set off for London with Dora, older forever on-the-verge-of-suicide half-sister. Grace marries Christian Thrale, a diplomat; Caro loves playwright Paul Ivory (married to ice cold aristocrat Tertia), marries American Adam Vail, then at last loves scientist Ted Tice, who has loved her from first sighting in the Thrales’ household decades earlier.

The story is primarily Caro’s and spans a world of maimed World War I diggers in the streets of Sydney, post-World War II in London, and an era that featured the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, a Greece of the Generals, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Vietnam of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, and the South America of political imprisonment. While it might be right to see Hazzard’s work as a great novel of manners, akin to Austen’s, the cold political reality of the outside world is much more overtly real than in the enclosed, albeit political, world of Jane Austen’s fiction.

There is, though, a feel of the eighteenth century in this book in the emphasis given to the art of writing and talking. All of the major female characters are women of immense wit and intelligence. Their verbal skills ripple through the novel and in combination with the wit and humor of the narrator, make the prose positively sparkle. But this is no feminist treatise on the superior intelligence of woman; the men, too (even the facile, shallow Paul Ivory), are acutely perceptive. Conversational acuity is paramount in the lives of these sharp, often brittle, people.

To the extent that the novel is about Antipodeans in Europe and America, it has affinities with Henry James’s novels of Americans in Europe, innocents abroad. Hazzard’s prose style, too, is Jamesian in its poise and in a certain circumlocution which defines as much by what it omits or merely hints at, as by what it asserts. A description of Paul Ivory’s physical beauty might well stand as the book’s description of its own defining mode: ‘As some fine portrait might be under painted dark where it showed light, or light where dark, so might Paul Ivory be subliminally cold where warm, warm where cold – the tones overlapping to create, ingeniously, a strong yet fluid delineation.’ This passage, in its contraries of dark and light, heat and cold, also suggests another remarkable feature of Hazzard’s writing, the ambiguous role of the narrator’s voice, a role explored later.

The novel has mythic dimensions, but not created by any tendency to labored allegorising. Take, for example, the characters’ names: Grace and Caro Bell (the book jokes about the C. Bell – Charlotte Brontë – significance), Edmund Tice, Christian Thrale, Paul Ivory, Cordelia, and so on. These are sometimes abstractions, sometimes mythic or literary, and they resonate through the story. And the book is peculiarly ‘literary’ – dozens of international writers and books are mentioned. Hazzard is firmly and rightly aligning her characters and her own work with a tradition of great literature. To try to track down the special significance of these would, I suspect, be a futile exercise, but they give the work a largeness, a depth, a universality.

Then there are the two primary sustained images: that of the book’s title, the idea of Caro as Venus eclipsing the sun (female principle extinguishing male principle) and which is the subject of a trite play by Paul Ivory; and the motif of drowning at sea. Caro and Grace are the progeny of parents who drowned in the sinking of the Benbow, and the book refers also to the sinking of battleships Tirpitz and Scharnhorst, and to the Marie Celeste. The novel ends with the collision of the two images in a beautiful paradox, with Ted and Caro, their love finally about to be consummated, taking a trip on a ferry in Sweden, and then in an airport lounge displaying a Passengers in Transit sign. Caro departs, and the book concludes with a simultaneous rising and sinking image: ‘Within the cabin, nothing could be heard. Only, as the plane rose from the ground, a long hiss of air – like the intake of humanity’s breath when a work of art shrivels in an instant; or the great gasp of hull and ocean as a ship goes down.’

The image is one of Caro being launched into transit as Venus, at the same time as being hurled down to hell. If this means that Caro will die, we also know that Ted Tice will die. The author tells us precisely that within minutes of our meeting him in the Thrales’ house at the start of the novel: ‘In fact Edmund Tice would take his life before attaining the peak of his achievement. But that would occur in a northern city and not for many years.’

The narrator’s voice is, indeed, remarkable. Here we are told something that lies quite beyond the book’s time span. At other times, the narrator refuses to guide us in interpreting materials. Hazzard’s use of conditionals – ‘perhaps’, ‘might’, ‘could’ – creates the illusion that events and attitudes just happen and exist without any authorial control. This effect is heightened and given a filmic quality by the author’s use of participial verbs: ‘Captain Nicholas Cartledge was waiting for a train.’; ‘Girls were getting up all over London’; ’Caro was sitting in a lofty tea-room waiting for Ted’. There is often a strange stasis in events as though the author’s eye simply roves over a varied tableau, observing it by parts. The structure is architecturally Gothic. The whole seems to be evident, from beginning to end, but the spectator cannot perceive that whole; individual segments are illuminated as they come under the scrutiny of the viewer – or, here, the eye of the narrator. This non-linear holistic effect is underscored by the book’s perpetual referring back to itself. If the author takes the liberty of looking into the future and forecasting Tice’s death, she also has her characters remembering passages from earlier parts of the narrative. It’s not just that they recall their own thoughts or conversations, but actually echo words from the apparently omniscient narration. The illusion is one whereby the characters seem to be free from control at the same time as they are conspiring with the author. The book is very conscious of itself.

The same effect is created when the characters, in social conversation at least, rarely say what they mean. We are given their actual speech, which is then followed by a statement from the author as to what they really meant or would like to say. And it’s often hard to tell who’s right – character or narrator.

This ambiguity, these contradictions, contribute to what is essentially a paradox in the novel’s subject matter. On the surface, it might seem that the book is about ‘the transit of Venus’, the eclipse of man by woman or, as Paul Ivory puts it ‘the eclipse of a man who takes up with a woman of character, even of genius’. But it has been seen that the novel ends ambiguously, with Caro as Venus but also with a premonition of her drowning. The battle for male or female supremacy seems unwinnable as the fortunes and loves of these characters see-saw. Caro is able to embrace all men as she moves from artist (Ivory) to original man and savior (Adam) to scientist (Tice), but she does not eclipse them, nor do they her. The book suggests, in any case, that the idea of woman eclipsing man is wrong: ‘Calculations about Venus often are (hopelessly out)’.

The Transit of Venus is a fine celebration of passion and the perennial sexual battle. Complex, ambiguous, subtle, it is also a work of warmth, wit, and great humor.