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Certain subjects in our popular culture never wear out. We seem never to tire of viewing, hearing, or reading about World War II (and the Nazis), for example, or the Civil War (and Lincoln), or the West (and Indians), or -- God help us -- Elvis.
Or the Titanic. About the sinking of that ship there is a continual stream of books and television shows and various kinds of projects. Just last summer someone tried to raise a multi-ton chunk of the fabled ocean liner, though the attempt failed and, with passengers on specially charted cruise ships watching nearby, the sea reclaimed its own.
Now this publishing season has brought us two novels about the behemoth's maiden, and only, voyage. In August, Farrar, Straus & Giroux brought out Psalm at Journey's End, by Erik Fosnes Hansen, a young Norwegian. I haven't read that, but if it is anything like Beryl Bainbridge's Every Man for Himself, which I have read, it is a very good novel, indeed.
Bainbridge is an Englishwoman who since the late 1960s has been writing novels that have largely dealt with working-class and lower-middle-class people in situations where banality and violence absurdly converge. Lately, though, she has taken to historical fiction. Two years ago Carroll & Graf brought out The Birthday Boys, a novel about the 1910-12 Scott expedition to the Antarctic. It didn't exactly take America by storm, which is a pity, because, as with all of Bainbridge's fiction, it is compelling reading.
Doom and the time period must have hooked the author, because the Titanic, like the Scott expedition, met its horrific fate in 1912. Bainbridge tells the story splendidly. If the sense of immediacy and of being there is not so strong as in The Birthday Boys, that may be because this densely populated floating stage is less focused than that icy one on which five men made the final push for the South Pole. There Bainbridge made the reader feel as if she had taken every blizzard-whipped step herself.
Not that she takes the ship's entire population as her cast. She concentrates on a handful who are in various ways connected to the first-person narrator, a young man known only as Morgan, the American nephew of the owner of the shipping line who, as an apprentice draftsman, had a very small part in the Titanic's creation.
Every Man for Himself is awash in mysteries that beguile, inveigle, and charm. Morgan's origins are mysterious; apparently he is some sort of orphan. He feels he is special in that he is often nearby when grisly events occur, such as the mysterious death of a man that opens the novel.
Among other mysterious characters are a tall, beautiful woman named Adele Baines whose mysterious circumstances are so desperate that she tries to kill herself; and a strange man named Scurra who, not long before the ship goes down, tells Morgan, "Have you not learnt that it's every man for himself?" And then there is that mysterious fire -- or so people say -- in the stokehold of No. 10 coal bunker.
This is a privileged lot of passengers, of course: the fashionable and moneyed -- and sometimes titled -- society set. It is an insular world of identical families whose dismembered private lives belie the icy serenity that they project.
What are they and where are they going? A Ship of Fools, humanity in microcosm sailing toward the destruction that will be World War I? Or is it just a boat, the "same boat" that they (and, by extension, we) are all in, as a seaman tells Morgan when their boat is sinking?
Who knows? I don't think that Bainbridge sends messages, hidden or otherwise. If there is one, it is contained in the book's bleak title. Basically, though, she just tells her story.
In the last 50 pages or so, as the ship goes down, that story turns quite gripping. The ship's orchestra plays famously away as the passengers mill about, confused, and men sit playing cards in the smoking room, calmly and stoically awaiting the end, accompanied by an unsuspecting, movie-comic drunk who from time to time raises his head from the table and excuses himself, "if this is a private conversation," and offers to "tiptoe away like a fairy."
When the end finally comes, Morgan tells himself, "Now that I knew I was going to live there was something dishonourable in survival." That just might be the most frightful thought in the whole grim story.
Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Lopez, Pennsylvania. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.