THE TRANSIT OF VENUS by Shirley Hazzard Viking; 337 pages; $11.95 " Venus can blot out the sun," the heroine of The Transit of Venus cries out, racked by her unremitting passion for a man who repeatedly abandons her. Astronomically, the observation is inaccurate. Still, there can be no doubt that Shirley Hazzard's Venus has eclipsed other recent efforts to illuminate the unending agonies of obsessive love. "The tragedy is not that love doesn't last," says another of the novel's sufferers. "The tragedy is the love that lasts."
Venus has the oddly elusive flavor of a 19th century novel. The two central characters, seemingly so genteel, are an unlikely pair to wash up on the wilder shores of love. Grace and Caro Bell are sisters, beautiful and well-bred, with neither property nor prospects. Orphaned young in their native Australia, they emigrate to England in their early 20s, accompanied by their half-sister Dora, who is both incubus and guardian. To the touch, the girls' surface is all coolness; the heat seems to have been drawn out of them during their struggle against Dora's ravenous self-love.
Among Hazzard's many strengths as a novelist, none is more dazzling than her ability to display the inner world of her characters in a few lines of lucid, supple, periodic prose. In Grace and Caro, "a vein of instinct sanity opened and flowed: a warning that every lie must be redeemed in the end . . . In their esteem for dispassion they began to yearn, perverse and unknowing, towards some strength that would, in turn, disturb that equilibrium and sweep them to higher ground."
Hazzard's sense of place is equally unerring. Born in Australia and currently dividing her time between Capri and New York City, she selected Italian backgrounds for her two earlier novels, The Evening of the Holiday and The Bay of Noon, and for several of her short stories. Even more pungent and persuasive, however, are her evocations of Australia and of English middle-class society in The Transit of Venus. Of Grace and Caro's Australia, Hazzard writes: "To appear without gloves, or in other ways suggest the flesh, to so much as show unguarded love, was to be pitchforked into brutish, bottomless Australia, all the way back to primitive man. Refinement was a frail construction continually dashed by waves of a raw, reminding humanity."
In flight from this barbarism, the two sisters alight at an English country house in the early 1950s. Grace soon slips into a conventional marriage. More independent, Caro aspires to a career in a government office. But when two men enter into Caro's orbit, they create a conjunction that would dismay an astrologer. The first, Ted Tice, becomes obsessed by Caro. He sees his attachment as an "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."