Reaching the End

Saying goodbye

Shirley Hazzard’s The Evening of the Holiday parallels, in many ways, the act of travel. Like many tourists who never achieve a full understanding of a place, Hazzard merely skims the surface with her writing, offering little depth in her story and constructing characters that fall flat. She, like the tourist who never gets to the heart of a place, does not explore the motives and feelings of her characters in a three-dimensional manner but simply tells the reader their inward thoughts. For example, in a scene where Sophie takes a walk with Tancredi, she writes that Sophie “felt like an outsider at a family feast. She wondered: What am I doing here, on this road, with this man, these sights, this language? She wished she were an authentic tourist” (43). In those few sentences Hazzard reveals all of Sophie’s thoughts in too obvious a manner without supporting them through the character’s actions or behavior, allowing her to become one-dimensional. Hazzard’s method is akin to someone who sees all the famous sights in a destination but feels no connection to them because he or she doesn’t comprehend them. The reader is put in this tourist’s shoes, where it’s impossible to gain a full understanding of the characters because there’s not enough information about them. There’s a barrier between the reader and character much the way there’s a separation between the ignorant tourist and the true culture of a locale.

Like the characters, Sophie and Tancredi’s affair lacks depth and realism. In this regard, their romance is similar to a vacation, something that is brief enough for no problems to arise. When we travel for leisure, we often separate ourselves from reality, suspending work and routines for a completely different lifestyle in a foreign place. We enter a myth that we know cannot last, a realm where we can eat all our meals in restaurants and spend the day wandering around instead of paying bills, emailing, and rushing from meeting to meeting. It’s a lifestyle we enjoy but understand that it’s temporary. Sophie’s love affair is similarly short-lived and only sweet because of its brevity. It doesn’t last long enough for either Sophie’s or Tancredi’s mannerisms or behaviors to annoy each other, as they would in a real, permanent relationship. Similarly, when we travel, we don’t spend a long enough time in a place to experience the downsides—buses that don’t run, supermarkets that run out of products, or difficult neighbors. Like a vacation, the love affair is not meant to last, as indicated in the last line of the novel. This passage describes how the bugler “tried to keep playing, to reach the end of the song,” an action that parallels Sophie and Tancredi’s attempt to stretch out their affair, with Sophie continuing to extend her stay (138). But like the train that “gather[s] speed” and makes “it impossible to play any longer,” the affair has to come to an end (138). The “playing,” the fun, the vacation, must stop at some point because it is, by nature, temporary.