As early as May 1912, Thomas Hardy's poem The Convergence of the
Twain captured the fatal and mesmerising conjunction of the iceberg and the
liner. In 1931, No?l Coward's play, Cavalcade, featured a comic scene
that reduces the tragedy to a brilliant theatrical joke. In 1996, Beryl
Bainbridge's Every Man for Himself was shortlisted for the
Booker.
More
immediately, there was a huge public appetite for spine-tingling
accounts of the disaster, from the scarcely perceptible moment of
impact
to the terrible screams of drowning men. Walter Lord's 1955 classic
A Night to Remember, which also became a movie, has illuminated every
subsequent Titanic book and film.
As
harrowing as the disaster was the fate of the 705 survivors whose
lives
were scarred by the horrors of that night. Andrew Wilson, the equal of
Walter Lord, reports this side of the story in Shadow of the
Titanic (Simon & Schuster), a gripping account of the sinking's bitter
aftermath.
Some,
like Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the White Star Line,
were
doomed to become a whipping boy for the catastrophe. For others, such
as
Madeleine Force Astor, whose husband, JJ Astor, sacrificed himself to
save his bride, life as a survivor became a danse macabre that ended in
marriage to a brutal and penniless Italian prizefighter.
The
Titanic story sponsors another circle of narrative hell: the
truth, or
otherwise, of what really happened once the ship went down. What,
for
instance, took place on lifeboat number one? In particular, what was
the
conduct of Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon? The press had a field day with
allegations of cowardice and corruption, including the bribing of the
lifeboat's crew. When Lady Duff Gordon gave evidence to the Board of
Trade investigation, her cross-examination exposed the fallibility of
memory, the frailty of the individual in extremis and the psychological
chasm between those who have, and those who have not, had to confront
imminent oblivion. Plainly, hers was an existential predicament.
Perhaps only fiction can tackle the moral
dilemmas braided into the survivor's tale. A compelling and disquieting first
novel, The Lifeboat,
by Charlotte Rogan (Virago), addresses this
question with a rich,
enthralling subtlety. Rogan's lifeboat is fictional,
as is her disaster –
the sinking of the Empress Alexandra in the summer of
1914 – but the
inspiration for her irresistible first-person narrative is
the Titanic.
Newly
married Grace Winter and her husband are honeymooning on a
transatlantic liner when it catches fire and sinks. Like JJ Astor,
Henry
Winter secures his new wife a single, life-saving seat on the last
lifeboat. Grace Winter survives. But, at her subsequent trial for
murder, we begin to discover – or do we? – the price the 22-year-old
widow has paid for her escape.
The Lifeboat is also an
escape route for its author.
Charlotte Rogan, who graduated from
Princeton in 1975, is a first-timer with
her own exceptional story.
Nurturing the ambition to be a novelist for many
years, she once took a
writing course with the late Harold Brodkey, another
writer who devoted
years to a magnum opus.
Brodkey was all posture. Rogan, who
modestly says she has been
teaching herself to write throughout her
adult life, is a much more
appealing figure. Like many women with
literary ambitions, she put her
family first and stayed at home in
Dallas, raising triplets. A chance
encounter with New York Times writer and fellow Texan Sara Mosle
revealed that Rogan had a drawer
full of unpublished fiction, including
several novels, written over 30
years.
With some trepidation, Mosle agreed to advise Rogan about
the
promotion of her work to a New York publisher, was impressed by what
she
found and put her in touch with literary agent David McCormick, who
proceeded
to clinch an immediate sale for one of Rogan's novels, a book
that Mosle had
not even read. This was The Lifeboat, which has
been acclaimed
before publication by both JM Coetzee and Emma Donoghue.
It looks set to
become Charlotte Rogan's literary life raft.
