Halifax Explosion in popular culture
The Halifax Explosion has frequently been the subject of works of popular culture.
The canonical novel Barometer Rising (1941) by the Canadian writer Hugh MacLennan is set in Halifax at the time of the explosion and includes a carefully researched description of its impact on the city. Following in MacLennan's footsteps, journalist Robert MacNeil penned Burden of Desire (1992) and used the explosion as a metaphor for the societal and cultural changes of the day. MacLennan and MacNeil exploit the romance genre to fictionalize the explosion, similar to the first attempt by Lieutenant-Colonel Frank McKelvey Bell, a medical officer who penned a short novella on the Halifax explosion shortly after the catastrophic event. His romance was A Romance of the Halifax Disaster (1918), a melodramatic piece that follows the love affair of a young woman and an injured soldier. There is also a young adult fictional story in the Dear Canada series, named No Safe Harbour, whose narrator tries to find the other members of her family after the blast.
More recently, the novel Black Snow (2009) by Halifax journalist Jon Tattrie followed an explosion victim's search for his wife in the ruined city,[1] and A Wedding in December (2005) by Anita Shreve has a story-within-the-story set in Halifax at the time of the explosion. The explosion is also referred to in some detail in John Irving's novel Until I Find You (2005) as well as Ami McKay's The Birth House (2006) in which protagonist Dora Rare travels to Halifax to offer her midwifery skills to mothers who go into labour after the explosion. In the 2009 novel, Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon, the shadowy schooner Golden Fang is revealed as a reoutfitted Preserved, a vessel said to have survived the explosion. In 2011, Halifax writer Jennie Marsland published her historical romance Shattered, which is set before the explosion and in its aftermath. An award-winning play entitled "Shatter"[2] by Trina Davies is set in the explosion and explores the racial profiling of German-speaking citizens after the event.
Keith Ross Leckie scripted a miniseries entitled Shattered City: The Halifax Explosion (2003), which took the title but has no relationship to Janet Kitz's acclaimed non-fiction book Shattered City: The Halifax Explosion and the Road to Recovery (1989). The miniseries follows soldier Charlie Collins through a romantic affair and his recovery from posttraumatic stress disorder. The movie exploited computer technology in order to achieve impressive special effects on a budget. However, the film was panned by critics and criticized by historians for distortions and inaccuracies. Aspects criticized were the representation of German spies in the city and countless other distortions of historical fact. Jim Lotz's The Sixth of December (1981) also toys with the fictional idea that Halifax was home to a network of enemy spies during the war.
The Heritage Minute episode on the Halifax Explosion tied for the most popular in a 2012 Ipsos Reid poll.[3] The event was also featured in an episode of Ghostly Encounters.
