A Seaworthy Vessel

“Women and children first” is not technically maritime law. But it was a given in 1914, two years after the Titanic sank and the year in which Charlotte Rogan’s superb first book, The Lifeboat, is set. Thus the overcrowded vessel of the title is mostly a women’s club, cast adrift after the wreck of the ocean liner Empress Alexandra. Among its members is the cunning narrator, Grace Winter, a first-class passenger returning from her European elopement.

A psychological horror story, The Lifeboat makes a fine period piece in this centennial month of the Titanic’s demise–all those full skirts soaking up seawater in the bilge while chilled castaways scan the horizon for their Carpathia, beckoned by messages tapped out on a Marconi machine. Grace gets a spot in Lifeboat 14 likely because her husband Henry, a banker, bought it for her. With Henry left behind, probably never to be seen again, Grace puts her faith in the Empress Alexandra’s brusque, able-bodied seaman John Hardie; she also demonstrates how well she knows the power of her own physical beauty.

For the reader, the question of eventual rescue isn’t much of an issue: a prologue has Grace not just back on terra firma but also facing unexplained murder charges. But for the 39 passengers, it’s a nightmarish uncertainty. Surrounded by waters full of the dead and dying, Hardie commands that they brutally turn away swimmers desperate to board. Rogan paints a vivid picture first of grimly necessary heartlessness and then, in the many days that follow, of mounting fears and resentments that eventually take a horrifying turn. In recounting their ordeal, Grace veers between admissions of her culpability (“If Mr. Hardie hadn’t beaten people away from the side of our boat, I would have had to do it myself”) and a righteous coyness that suggests she’s incapable of revealing the whole truth. (The unreliable narrator drifting at sea at times calls to mind Life of Pi, although Rogan’s instincts are earthbound, not spiritual.)

Meanwhile, other models of womanhood emerge in contrast to Grace, notably the natural-born leader and proto-second-wave feminist Mrs. Grant, who becomes a thorn in Hardie’s side. The bickering between Hardie and Grant feels as real and immediate as watching your mother and father argue from the backseat, only with infinitely higher stakes than where to stop for lunch. Unrest stirs when Hardie warns that the crowded lifeboat won’t stay afloat in rough seas. The women steadfastly ignore the suggestion of volunteers’ going overboard, and a lottery is proposed for the eight adult male passengers. “Why the men? Why only the men?” asks Mr. Nilsson, a passenger from Sweden. Even in an age of chivalry and the “weaker sex,” it’s a good question.

The Lifeboat is a tremendously fast-paced read, fueled by the mystery of whom Grace and her co-defendants are accused of killing and why. Every castaway with a speaking part becomes suspect in some way, though in a tantalizing turn, Rogan leaves it up to the reader to decide who deserves to walk the proverbial plank, stirring a diabolically fun internal debate. Rogan is a novelist on her maiden voyage, but she steers The Lifeboat with a remarkably assured hand.