Every Man For Himself

"I wanted to include a novel, because fiction can do things that a straightforward historical narrative can’t, no matter how deeply and widely researched. You can’t really get at what people were thinking and feeling at the time, in the moment as the event was happening. Bainbridge’s book takes an event that we know a lot about—and even if we don’t know a lot about it, we know what the end of the story is. We know that the ship goes down but Bainbridge manages to build mystery and intrigue into it. It’s narrated by a protagonist named Morgan, a young relative of JP Morgan, who has done an apprenticeship at Harland and Wolff, the Titanic’s builders. He’s kind of in, but not entirely part of that world of the first class passengers, because he grew up in poverty, and was rescued by JP Morgan and JP Morgan’s money. He’s also a closeted socialist—an ambivalent and complex character. Then there are other mysterious incidents and characters, including a shape-shifting character named Scurra, who seems to be everywhere and nowhere and has almost a supernatural quality about him. You can’t quite figure out how he knows intimate things about the narrator and about other passengers. It’s got intriguing coincidences, double crosses, unrequited love, sex. I should say there isn’t much great Titanic fiction. There’s a lot of not-so-great science fiction and not-so-great romance fiction about the Titanic. This is the one novel I’ve encountered that is subtle, free of stereotypes and cliches, and beautifully written. Its pacing as the disaster unfolds is extraordinary. You know from the beginning that the narrator survives, not only because he’s telling the story, but because the novel starts as he’s about to get swept off the ship and then it backs up in time to the day of the Titanic’s departure to develop the narrator’s inner life and build suspense. Bainbridge brought fresh imagination to a story that tends to get hackneyed. The films about the Titanic are better overall than the fiction. The movie version of A Night to Remember, a British production directed by Roy Ward Baker from 1958, is a wonderful movie, and holds up extremely well. I have mixed feelings about the Cameron film, but it’s spectacular, of course, and it’s completely absorbing. And anybody who had a book that came out about the Titanic in the mid-to-late 1990s isn’t really in a position to complain about that film, because it really helped sales a lot!"