[Shirley Hazzard has used the phrase 'no-man's land' as] an appropriate correlative to the geographical dislocation which has become such a feature of our own world and times.

The importance of this sense of geographical dislocation is evident in all her work to date: it is common to many of the stories in her first collection, Cliffs of Fall (1963), but more particularly in the two novellas The Evening of the Holiday (1966) and The Bay of Noon (1970). At a quite superficial level it is suggested by the variety of locations she has chosen for her fictions: the novellas are both set in Italy and the short stories take the reader from America to Switzerland, from England to Italy. (p. 182)

The 'loss of geographical and, to some extent, national and even social, sense of belonging' is a deprivation suffered by many of Shirley Hazzard's heroines and is particularly true of Sophie, in The Evening of the Holiday. One measure of her dislocation is to be found in the fact that she is half English and half Italian, and although she frequently travels to Italy to see her relatives she nevertheless considers herself a stranger. And this is so despite her evident pleasure in all that life in Italy affords. But her enjoyment remains the enjoyment of the outsider. This sense is confirmed by the realisation of the difference between the 'exclusively decorative' landscape she experiences as an outsider and the more 'domestic' face it reveals to those who are its children. She experiences the 'solitary pang of the expatriate' and even those places to which she feels most drawn remain 'mere approximations of home'. While she is on holiday she reluctantly comes to love Tancredi but in a beautifully controlled climax, thrown into high relief by the brilliant light of an Italian summer and drawing subtly on references to Renoir's painting 'The Upward Path', the differences which separate the two lovers can no longer be ignored and it is plain that ultimately Sophie will have to leave.

The progress of Sophie and Tancredi's love is carefully paced and controlled through images of war, that great cause of disruption and dispersal in this century. When they first meet, Tancredi is quite indifferent, although there are occasional sparks in their exchanges which suggest that 'if he particularly wanted to he could make a conquest of Sophie'. The fact of his age (like many of the men in Shirley Hazzard's fictional world, he is the elder) and the failure of his marriage raise the possibility that the battle might have passed him by: we are shown him 'pinned to a sofa among the women and the aged, like someone left behind during a war'. When Sophie, equally reluctant, finally agrees to travel with him to Florence her acquiescence is like that of 'a defeated general'. (pp. 182-83)

There could be no better demonstration of the control which Shirley Hazzard exercises over the telling of this story than the central importance of the incident which gives the novella its title. Sophie's decision to go to Florence—her surrender—is made on the very day on which the town celebrates its most famous battle. (p. 183)

[Homesickness], the permanent sense of lack,… is behind Jenny's searching in The Bay of Noon.

Jenny's return to England after a childhood exile in South Africa (an exile occasioned by war) has 'unlooked-for adult pleasures'…. She is driven forth again by the realisation of a futile love for her brother and, armed with a letter of introduction to a woman in Naples, accepts a job in that city. A friendship grows but Jenny's permanent sense of lack, her homesickness, remains an index of the difference between herself and Gioconda. (pp. 184-85)

The image of no-man's land, with its associations of war, is both the expression and the cause of the disruption which afflicts our age. It was because of war that Jenny was exiled to South Africa; even her name had been altered from Penelope to Jenny as a result. Her life in South Africa is not only a new life, it is also a 'double life' because of this, but it is only in retrospect that she knows herself to have been 'among the victims of war'. The hand of war rests no less emphatically on all the characters of The Bay of Noon. Justin, too, has felt it, although he is prepared to give war a wider significance in the affairs of men and link it specifically with the loss of a sense of territory: 'war was like a great syphon that sprayed human beings all over the globe'.

Jenny's quest has been a quest for a sense of place but it has also been a search for a past, for continuity…. That the novel is itself structured about the need to order the past, to impose a pattern on experience, is evident in the carefully wrought opening with its evocative images of the search for a lost plane—a plane discovered eventually 'closer to home'—and in the closing references to other explorations. (pp. 185-86)

War, no-man's land, the need for a sense of belonging—these are some of the tortuous strands which thread through the novels and stories of Shirley Hazzard. But there is another which connects the rest. Although Shirley Hazzard has suggested that it is 'the task of the serious writer to link the factual matter of our lives to the human functions and sensations of memory, of suffering, love, animosity, terror, pleasure and affection', nevertheless of these human functions and sensations love seems to be, for her, pre-eminent. John Colmer, in what is to date the only extensive discussion of her work, has sensitively traced these 'patterns and preoccupations of love' [see excerpt above]. The importance of the quest for love—a search that on one occasion is described as 'the adult journey to the beloved'—remains, whatever the outcome. It is true that, for many of the women of the novels and stories, there is only the pain and loss of love. (p. 186)

Although Shirley Hazzard pursues those concerns which she identifies as the dominant ones for present-day writers, concerns which are of profound importance for one's understanding of our own times and our own humanity, the events which frame them are acted out on a stage without elaborate sets or magnificent costumes. There are no cataclysmic happenings and no exotic locations, despite their variety. There are no grand passions, but simple fears and desires that spring from the common heart. It is this commitment to the commonalty that gives her work both its profound sensitivity and its enormous strength. (p. 187)