I was curious to discover why “The Transit of Venus” has been regarded by some critics as a modern classic, one of the most outstanding novels of the C20.

Growing up in Australia in the years leading up to World War II, Caro and Grace are orphaned when a ferry, the Benbow, capsizes in Sydney harbour, leaving them to be raised by their difficult, manipulative cousin Dora, apparently based on the author’s own mother: “a destroyer who sees herself as a perpetual victim”.

An Australian herself, born in 1931, Shirley Hazzard was well-placed to describe life in a distant Dominion where children are taught British history and culture as being somehow more important and interesting than their own. For the sisters, “going to Europe” is “about as final as going to heaven. A mystical passage”.

Once in England, pretty, passive Grace is quickly married off to the stuffy, pompous bureaucrat Christian. Less conventional and more of a risk-taker, Caro is caught in a triangle of “doomed love” between on one hand, the charismatic, egotistical playwright Paul Ivory, to whom she is physically attracted, and on the other, scientist Ted Tice with whom she has a strong rapport, in a meeting of minds. The narrative takes us through several decades into their late middle age, focusing on certain key events. So in its disjointed, wide-ranging scenes, it is a kind of literary soap opera.

I was initially puzzled by the style of a book which, first published in 1995, seemed to date from an earlier age, until I read that Hazzard had greatly admired Henry James. By coincidence, I read it immediately after Virgina Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway”, a ground-breaking “stream of consciousness” novel. There are parallels with this style in “The Transit of Venus”, which although generally written in carefully crafted sentences, often breaks off to leave them hanging, unfinished. They drift in and out of direct speech, and wander as thoughts do. The reader has to concentrate continuously to pick up allusions to past events, not to mention the clues required to understand the novel’s ending. Although I have only read it once, this is one of those novels which needs to be reread slowly, to grasp its meaning and appreciate it more fully.

Hazzard was clearly a talented writer, but perhaps because every chapter went through many (it has been suggested twenty-seven) drafts, the result often seems contrived. Although some of the dialogue is very realistic, at other times it appears artificial and pretentious, like the opening comment in a hotel bedroom scene: “I like this eclecticness. Most eclecticness is too dark”. I did not find the characters particularly convincing or engaging. Yet perhaps they were inspired by people met in Shirley Hazzard’s unusual life: she travelled a good deal as the daughter of a diplomat, through her employment in offices of the United Nations, and her marriage to a respected “Flaubert scholar”. In other words, how many “ordinary” people did she meet?

At times the novel is a page-turner, with interesting anecdotes, thought-provoking observations, striking and original descriptions, and beautiful prose. At others, sentences become incomprehensible, passages seem overwrought, and attempts to introduce a sense of the societal changes or politics of the time appear clunky. Chapter 31, located in a New York television studio where Caro overhears a conversation which has something to do with the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs, is probably based on an incident which the author experienced, but makes little sense and jars in being so misplaced and overlong.

What will Gen Z and those who come afterwards make of all this?