A book not to be judged by its cover

Burden of Desire by Robert MacNeil
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is a complete surprise. Its title is at once misleading and accurate: one might easily expect Burden of Desire to be third-rate lightweight romantic escapism for a predominantly female readership. The only reason I read it was that I was urged to do so by a friend whose judgement I trust.

It is, in fact, an historical novel of depth, complexity and insight, which starts from a single event – the explosion of a munitions ship in Halifax harbour, Nova Scotia, in 1917 – and traces the aftershock of that disaster through the lives of three main protagonists, a woman and two men. In examining the psychology of the sexual repression and liberation of a post-Victorian era, it provides a detailed, almost clinical analysis of – yes, you’ve guessed it – the burden of desire.

It is above all a study of conflict: the Freudian tension between sexual repression and liberation, certainly, but also the conflict between the entrenched hierarchical certainties of the past and the fluid uncertainties and passionate experimentalism of the present.