| Back to Review Index | Go to the Home Page |
September and November 2006 A surprising gift from my father.
Surprising, because my mother has always been the book worm, so I don't know if he's ever given me literature before. This book is Canadian literature, written by a somewhat known Canadian author, about a Canadian event; The Halifax explosion. (If you've never heard of it, then know that it was about 100 years ago, and it happened in the harbour city of Halifax, which was up to one third destroyed. -And then a blizzard came in, to make the many thousands without homes freeze.)
But the explosion is only half of the content of this book; It is more a novel about one man from Halifax. His problems with his family, with life, with his feelings, and with the world. Three quarters through the book, we are given a strong taste of what the explosion was like, and then in the last pages, we conclude with the change that it made in this one man's life. As a story about the life of this man, it's not a bad tale. I had some empathy with the characters, though I have to say that they were a little flat, and too simplified. Their personalities didn't seem authentic enough to me. It wasn't that they were all one dimensional; The author made an effort to make them seem more real, and alive, and give each one unique characteristics. -It's just that the way he made each one unique wasn't convincing. That's my opinion of the novel side of it.
The historical side; the side describing this event, was better done. There, we needed little information about the main players of the explosion. When every page produces a new face in the crowd, that has one little physical aspect which is noticed, performs one action which is remembered, and is then gone, I have a true feeling of the chaos, the panic, and the... destruction of the whole order of a city and society.
The more I think about it, the better this way of presenting the disaster seems; It wasn't something which happened to one person, so the more points of view we get, the better. A building that wasn't completely destroyed is seen through the eyes of a disbelieving child, wandering about the streets, seeing the destruction. The heat of the ship just before the explosion is seen by the fire fighters trying to put out the flames. The feel of the explosion over the countryside is intimated by the sailors who had abandoned ship, went to shore, and lay down in the forest, hoping not to get injured when in blew up. And so on. It's done mostly with characters that have been somewhat introduced already in the story, even if they are rather minor characters.
I remember being in the train last night, and shivering, with the descriptions of the rescue workers, going through the blizzard, trying to dig through the endless collapsed buildings, for thirty hours at a time. I could taste the acrid left over smoke in the air, and the stabbing cold that starts to hurt everywhere over the body. The exhaustion, cold, misery, hopelessness, and blinding freezing snow were so real to me, I feared leaving the train, and exposing myself to it. (Even though it's a mild winter so far here in Lüneburg, with no snow, and never even frost yet.)
The end of the book was a bit satisfying then, but only because one could see justice in the good, honest men having a life to look forward to, and closure for those who needed it.