Burden of Desire
The disastrous 1917 explosion of a munitions ship in Halifax Harbor, Nova Scotia, forms the backdrop to this “rich, abundantly humane love story” (Chicago Tribune)-”a powerful piece of work” (Washington Post Book World) that marks an “auspicious fiction debut for an already accomplished author and award-winning journalist” (Chicago Sun-Times).
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The disastrous 1917 explosion of a munitions ship in Halifax Harbor, Nova Scotia, forms the backdrop to this “rich, abundantly humane love story” (Chicago Tribune)-”a powerful piece of work” (Washington Post Book World) that marks an “auspicious fiction debut for an already accomplished author and award-winning journalist” (Chicago Sun-Times).Denver PostPut another log on the fire. Curl up in your coziest quilt. Don't answer the phone. This is a novel to be savored....A fast-moving action and suspense novel set against the historic tapestry of king, empire, and war. Extraordinary.
\ Denver PostPut another log on the fire. Curl up in your coziest quilt. Don't answer the phone. This is a novel to be savored....A fast-moving action and suspense novel set against the historic tapestry of king, empire, and war. Extraordinary.\ \ \ \ \ Robert WilsonMacNeil's nonfiction books have reached large audiences. But Burden of Desire suggests that it is as a novelist that the world might remember him. -- USA Today\ \ \ Publishers Weekly\ - Publisher's Weekly\ MacNeil, co-anchor of the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" on PBS-TV, has always seemed an earnest, traditional sort, and that's the kind of first novel he has written. It is also, however, warm-hearted, has a thoroughly original background and setting, and offers an offbeat romantic triangle focusing on an unusually appealing heroine. The story begins with a bang--literally, as a munitions ship blows up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917 in what will be the biggest, most destructive man-made explosion until the atomic bomb. Picking up the pieces in the well-evoked ruined city are young parson Peter Wentworth, an ambitious man in an unhappy marriage, and Stewart MacPherson, a psychiatrist just beginning to treat shell-shocked returning soldiers. The two read a diary accidentally lost in the wreckage, belonging to Julia Robertson, a young, unconventional woman whose beauty and self-acknowledged sensuality ensnares each of them in turn...this leisurely, rather creakily plotted novel does not strive for suspense; it is a portrait of a narrow provincial society in its first stirrings of doubt regarding many previously fixed notions: patriotism, religion, cowardice, honor. As such, it brings Halifax and its anguish sensitively to life, and in Julia Robertson creates the kind of woman who will always set men dreaming.\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsPBS newsman MacNeil's first novel is about sex and war and love and loyalty and civic calamity in early 20th-century Halifax. It's intelligent, balanced, polished, and reasonable as you might expect; the high artistry is a very pleasant surprise. In the middle of WW I, as the citizens of Halifax, Nova Scotia, struggle to keep faith in King and empire despite disproportionate casualties among Canadian troops, there is a domestic disaster on the scale of the San Francisco earthquake or the Chicago fire: A French ship loaded with munitions and fuel catches fire and explodes, leveling the north end of the city. In the ensuing confusion the diary of Julia Robertson, a beautiful young matron, falls into the hands of Peter Wentworth, an ambitious Anglican clergyman, who reads the book through and becomes obsessed with the writer without, at first, knowing who she is. Julia, whose army officer husband has been two years at the front, has set down explicitly her sexual history and feelings. The diary and the disaster combine to do serious damage to all of Peter's careful constructions of faith and honor. He passes the book to his boyhood friend Stewart MacPherson, a budding Freudian analyst, who becomes every bit as interested in the author as Peter but in a much healthier way. Before things sort themselves out, Stewart has a go at straightening out a shell-shocked soldier; Peter's marriage nearly disintegrates and his career skyrockets; and more. A very sharp examination of a bitter time in a modest place. MacNeil writes wonderfully well and has a great deal to say about intelligent, middle-class people trying to sort things out in the face of calamity.\ \
