“The Transit of Venus” by Shirley Hazzard

This novel is a love story, tragedy, and unforeseen mystery all rolled into one. There are untimely deaths, love triangles, and astronomical observations. The protagonists are two orphaned sisters from Australia, Grace and Caro, who have made their way to London to seek a better life through job and marriage prospects. “You could see the two sisters had passed through some unequivocal experience, which, though it might not interest others, had formed and indissolubly bound them. It was the gravity with which they sat, ate, talked and, you could practically say, laughed. It was whatever they exchanged, not looking at one another but making a pair.” The younger, Grace, before too long, found herself engaged into a properly distinguished middle class English family— the paterfamilias, an astronomer, the betrothed, a bureaucrat in the Africa section of the foreign service on the come. “Australia required apologies, and was almost a subject of ribaldry. Australia could only have been mitigated by an unabashed fortune from its newly minted sources—sheep, say, or sheep-dip…. Sefton Thrale would explain, “Christian has got himself engaged”—implying naive bungling—“to an Australian girl.” And with emphatic goodwill might add that Grace was a fine young woman and he himself was delighted, “Actually.””

The hero of the novel is Ted, a young astronomer, born into poverty, but plucked from toil, given scholarships, and recognized as a future genius within the scientific community. “Ted Tice already understood his attachment to Caro as intensification of his strongest qualities, if not of his strengths: not a youthful adventure, fresh and tentative, but a gauge of all effort, joy, and suffering known or imagined. The possibility that he might never, in a lifetime, arouse her love in return was a discovery touching all existence. In his desire and foreboding, he was like a man awake who watches a woman sleeping.” His foil and competitor for Caro’s love is Paul. “Paul Ivory was a man of promise in a literal sense: circumstances had made a solemn understanding to see Paul prosper. His play would be widely and justly praised. Provincial towns and foreign cities would clamor for it, and a famous director would make a successful film. The radiant pre-eminence of Paul’s engagement with events was far more bridal than his prospective betrothal to Tertia Drage.” Again, the elder Thrale sets the scene, “Sefton Thrale told Ted Tice, “Paul will make his mark.” Like praising a pretty girl to a plain one. And yet there was the sense that Paul Ivory and Ted Tice were both marked men, and symbolically opposed. It was not merely that the world had set the two of them at odds. More irrationally, it seemed that one of them must lose if the other were to win.”