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For years, no one outside Nova Scotia has written about the great Halifax disaster of 1917, the world's largest explosion until Hiroshima.
But suddenly, and coincidently, three recent books deal with a catastrophe that killed nearly 2,000 people and injured 6,000. One is a narrative history and two are novels by well-known writers.
The narrative history is Laura Mac Donald's Curse of the Narrows (Walker, $26). It re-creates the events of Dec. 6, 1917, when a munitions ship headed for action in World War I collided with another vessel, setting off a blast that destroyed much of Halifax. Beyond the dead, hundreds were blinded by glass from shattered windows.
The novels are A Wedding in December by Anita Shreve (Little, Brown, $25.95) and Until I Find You by John Irving (Random House, $27.95).
A Wedding in December, which is set in the aftermath of 9/11, features an English teacher who is writing about the Halifax explosion. It's the second time that Shreve has brought up the catastrophe. Her 2002 novel, Sea Glass, briefly mentions it as well.
With Irving, the explosion is a subplot. His main character is an actor who returns to his native Halifax to work on a proposed movie about the disaster.
The novels have received far more attention than the history, but Mac Donald says she's not envious. "Why should I be jealous? John Irving and Anita Shreve are publicizing my book without even knowing it."
The origins of Mac Donald's book go back 40 years to her elementary school near Halifax, where she first heard of the 1917 explosion. She remembers rushing home to tell her mother, who told her about her mother, who was 250 miles away when she heard the blast that cracked the plaster on her walls.
In fact, as Mac Donald later learned, the blast was so powerful that scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer used data from Halifax to calculate the effects of an atomic bomb during World War II.
In early 2001, shortly after MacDonald moved from Toronto to New York, an editor suggested she write a book on the explosion.
She did the research but concluded that the story had been documented and that she didn't want to "write it just because I happened to be from there." As a former comedy writer, she also felt uncomfortable writing about a tragedy. Two weeks after that decision, she watched from her window in upper Manhattan as the smoke rose from what had been the World Trade Center. Her thoughts again returned toHalifax.
The parallels with 9/11 "made it seem like part of a bigger story and gave me a new way into it." One of the books she consulted was Ground Zero: A Reassessment of the 1917 Explosion in Halifax Harbor by A. Howell Ruffman, published in 1994, seven years before Ground Zero took on new meaning.
For decades, Mac Donald says, many of the survivors of the Halifax explosion have avoided talking about it, as if "not speaking about bad things, they might not happen again. It's very Catholic of us."
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