There is something endlessly fascinating about the sinking of the Titanic. Perhaps it is the idea that people were going about their business, enjoying their lives, until hours before they were suddenly swept away into oblivion. Perhaps it is the number of blunders that contributed to this disaster and how easily most of them could have been avoided. Perhaps it is the feeling you get that certain events are destined and nothing could prevent it happening, or the indiscriminate way some people survived while others died. Or perhaps just the unparalleled opportunity it gives us to glimpse man at his best and his worst, extremely courageous or abjectly cowardly, facing death with a bravery you cannot imagine, or scrambling to save only himself without regard for others at all.

Whatever the allure, I confess to being always willing to be drawn into another tale of the events of that cold April night. In that regard, however, I do not find this to be one of the better told accounts. I did not connect to Morgan, and certainly not to his rich and pompous friends, or find his behavior either before or during the disaster to be particularly enlightening. The first half of the book plods, but the second half that deals with the sinking itself moves at a pace that takes your breath. I feel that must have been how it seemed to those on board--a slow and easy ride, right up until the moment it was excruciatingly over.

I enjoyed the book, but was not overly impressed, and I was astonished to know that it was short-listed for the Booker. If you want to read a tale about the Titanic, I highly recommend A Night to Remember.

To my own good fortune, this book was published in 1996, thus fulfilling a criteria for a challenge I have taken on for the summer...so, everything is good. ( )

Every Man for Himself does not have a narrative in the conventional sense. But it nevertheless manages to function by giving the reader the voyeristic opportunity to eavesdrop on the comings and goings of the well-heeled passengers of a doomed ocean liner. It is the quirks of the cast of characters and their relationships that is the main attraction here; the Titanic theme is but window dressing.

That said, the setting is used to good effect. One thing I found quite clever is the way that the novel continuously hints at enigmatic happenings with the promise that all will become clear in due course, only for the inevitable disaster to strike before any of the mystery is resolved. In the end, we are left with a handful of unresolved plot threads and the sense that our relationship with the characters was cut short too soon. In some way, this is a small reminder that we don't get to postpone tragedy until a time that is convenient.

This is not a terribly visual novel because the author spends very little time describing the environment. But this liberates the text to focus on events rather than static scenes, which lends the whole piece a certain momentum. ( )

"Almost at once, what we had felt faded, and nothing remained of the experience save for three wisps of smoke spiralling from the blown-out candles ..." (p.122)

Beryl Bainbridge had an amazing facility for sneaking up on a subject. Several of her impressive list of novels deal with subjects that, you might think, had been done to death (Adolf Hitler, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Scott of the Antarctic, to name a few), and yet she managed to make them feel fresh, and new.

The story of the Titanic, in the 100 years since the disaster, has been told in just about any way a reader could possibly imagine. Overblown melodrama (I'm naming no names), forensic analysis, allegory of hubris (of the patriarchy, technology, capitalism, take your pick), or dispatches from the front lines of the class war ... to quote the immortal words of satire magazine "The Onion," WORLDS LARGEST METAPHOR HITS ICE-BERG What on earth is a writer supposed to do with that?

Bainbridge's short novel goes back to the experience: what would it have been like to be a passenger on the Titanic? The passengers are usually rendered as bit-players in the tale of their own demise (or survival) -- it's the ship, and its final, excruciating two hours, that is the star of the show. Bainbridge reverses this: we are asked to care about a motley group of passengers (mostly first-class, with some from the lower decks, crew and representatives of Harland & Wolff), and briefly play along with their assumption that the worst things that are going to happen on their five-day crossing are embarrassingly unrequited crushes, social faux-pas played out in full view of the "crème de la crème" of Transatlantic society, and creeping shame-faced into New York Harbor under cover of darkness, having broken no speed records. Oh, if only.

Bainbridge achieves this by masterful use of first-person narration, handing the telling of the story over to Morgan, a young man who has grown up in the society of the glittering, privileged first class, but whose dubious birth gives him plenty of reason to doubt whether he belongs, or even wants to count himself as one of them. Bainbridge plays it absolutely straight with Morgan's perspective: there are no clumsy references to what is to come, lurking just over the horizon as the great ship steams ahead, no laments of "if only I had known ..." What foreshadowing there is -- those wisps of smoke spiralling from the three candles; a tray of plates crashing to the bottom of a broken dumb-waiter; a little boy playing with a top, fading into ghostly transparency against the backdrop of the setting sun -- is delicate and heartbreakingly beautiful. Morgan seems to be writing his account in real-time, convinced of the invulnerability of himself and his world, and seeing it as all a bit of a lark, even as the end game begins, and we slip into legend, and the accounts that we are all too familiar with.

"... I distinctly heard voices uttering sentences that didn't finish. An hour and a half. Possibly. ... Hadn't we better cancel that ... As we have lived so will we ... If you'll get the hell out of the ... (p. 163) ( )

Morgan is the nephew (at least by marriage) of J.P. Morgan the American financier. In the April of 1912 he's in London, nominally to supervise the shipping of his uncle's art collection to the States, and of course he chooses to return on the new flagship of his uncle's shipping line, the R.M.S Titanic. As a result of his family connections Morgan is a member of the global elite of his day, along with politicians, industry magnates, bankers and aristocrats from both sides of the Atlantic. As becomes clear when he boards the ship, it's a close-knit group of people: Morgan complains "I could pick out fifty or more I've known half my life and Lord knows how many others I've shared a dinner table with in half the capitals of Europe". But Morgan, while he has lived that life for almost as long as he can remember, had a very different start: on his first trip to the U.S. aged 5 he was a passenger in steerage, far from the opulence of the first class salons of the most luxurious ship in the world. And Scurra, one of the few first class passengers who Morgan does not know, is surprisingly able to throw some light on his early existence...

Of course, everyone knows what happens to the Titanic, so no spoilers in saying that the ship sinks! But the picture of the decadent and privileged society painted before the ship hits the iceberg is well done. And the depiction of the reactions of the passengers and crew to the disaster is even more successful.

As with other Beryl Bainbridge books I have read, this is superficially a simple read, but leaves the reader with a lot to think about by the end. ( )

A vivid account of the voyage of the Titanic from an incident the night before the ship sails to the sinking and the sight of the Carpathia coming to the rescue of the survivors. Seen through the eyes of the young American Morgan, interacting with various First Class passengers and in particular the seductive Wallis and dastardly and mysterious Scurra - though every character is shrouded in his or her own mystery, including the narrator himself, whose background is slowly unravelled. As we see the characters through snatches of overheard conversation or glimpses as we meet them in a corridor or going up steps, in an elevator or in the dining room, you get the impression of being there, surrounded by the brouhaha and bustle. Remarkably imaginative writing; that Beryl Bainbridge was also an accomplished artist was new to me. ( )