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The Lifeboat A Novel Charlotte Rogan 9780316185905 Books

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The Lifeboat A Novel Charlotte Rogan 9780316185905 Books

This book is a study in moral psychology.

If you enjoy novels that refuse to serve up easy answers to some of the most profound questions at the core of human experience, then this book is for you. In Rogan's The Lifeboat, there are no absolute heros or villains. Instead, the main characters are portrayed as a complex hybrid of good and evil--parceled out layer by layer. In the end, the characters and the narrative force the reader to ask whether her own morality would hold up under more extraordinary circumstances, thus raising the question of whether most people's moral identities are clouded by the distance between them and truly devastating decisions/circumstances.

The novel is written in a style that echoes the early 1800s, which I loved, but if you dislike that period in English literature, this book might not be for you. I thought it was both extraordinarily well written and deeply thought provoking. Definitely worth the read.


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The Lifeboat A Novel Charlotte Rogan 9780316185905 Books Reviews

The year is 1914, just before the start of World War I. The Empress Alexandra, a large passenger liner on a passage from Britain to New York has just sunk after having been set aflame by an explosion of some sort; and 22 year old Grace Winter, a newlywed, who was on her way with her husband Henry to meet Henry's very upper class parents in the US is one of 39 survivors crammed into a lifeboat with a "maximum capacity" of 36. So begins her first person narrative of survival - three weeks in an open boat in mid Atlantic during which only 25 survive the ordeal.

It's not written to tell a story. No. She writes it to help her defense lawyers in the murder case brought against her and two other survivors in New York after the rescue. But from the first page to the last in this remarkable first novel by Charlotte Rogan the whole book is a great story and Grace's story is just a story within the larger work, well written, with memorable characters and the not unusual plot of how we behave when forced to endure deadly mutual peril in situations from which there is no escape.

It's not a sea story; and Ms. Rogan is not a Joseph Conrad when it comes to describing being in a open boat in the mid Atlantic - an experience which this writer can testify changes one's perspective on things real fast. (No there was no real danger - a 16 foot motor whaleboat transferring the doctor from our destroyer escort to a merchant ship with a very sick crewmember in a large Gibraltar bound convoy in 1943.) She is, however, a talented novelist and I hope this is not the last novel from her pen.
That seems to be the fundamental question this book asks. Its an interesting concept and I think the author explores it really well. This is a book that takes a while to read. It's not light reading and its not just a story. There are a lot of philosophical queries in the book that seem to take over the main story and take a while to digest. I'm still not sure what to think of this book. I honestly can't say I liked it or even enjoyed it. I can appreciate a lot of the arguments it presents and found my self pondering them as I read. It's very well written at times. The words flowed and the imagery was beautiful, but there were also times where it just seemed to go on forever and I found myself having to re-read certain parts because my attention had strayed. Grace (the main character) is extremely indecisive. I didn't really like her but I can also appreciate that we (the reader) aren't really meant to like her. She is extremely weak at times, and manipulative and immoral at others. The characters in this book are put in an impossible situation and asked to survive. The story follows their journey from being rather normal human beings to turning into amoral beings in order to survive. The concept is really a very interesting one, but the story could not keep my attention the whole time. The ending leaves a lot to be desired. I would suggest reading this book for the philosophical questions it puts through and not for the actual story line.
The Lifeboat is a tale of desperation, guile, hope and betrayal. It is about 39 people who find themselves in a lifeboat right after their large ship, the Empress Alexandra, sinks. The story takes place in 1914, two years after the sinking of the great ship, the Titanic. As with the Titanic, there was insufficient space on the lifeboats for all the passengers. Supposedly, the lifeboats could fit 39 people but at the last minute the manufacturer reduced the capacity of the lifeboats. However, they did not change the metal tag that said the capacity was 39 people.

So here we have 39 people jockeying for a place on a lifeboat not made to fit them all. A seaman named Hardie takes control of one of the boats and is a natural leader though cold and hard. He controls everything that happens on the boat as it flounders at sea waiting for days and then weeks for a rescue ship that never comes. The survivors eat the fish he spears, the birds that fall from the sky into the ship and find themselves not unlike animals. "The nights were cold, and the more emaciated we became, the less our bodies worked to keep us warm. When I looked at the others, I was shocked to notice their sunken eyes and hollow cheeks...and I knew we had all retreated into memory in order to escape the harsh realities of our plight."

Fear was their constant companion. Along with fear, their true natures were coming out. "The bare bones of our natures were showing. None of us was worth a spit. We were stripped of all decency. I couldn't see that there was anything good or noble left once food and shelter were taken away." The gray areas of morality were very clear. Nothing was black or white. One thing that was clear though was that "I looked around and realized that we were all predators and that we always had been."

Grace is the protagonist of the story and the narrator. However, we don't know how accurate her rendition of events actually is. She keeps her cards close. We do know that she tried to take advantage of things in her life prior to finding herself in this boat. We know that she chose her husband after reading an article in the social pages of her newspaper, knowing he was rich and a good catch. Stealing him didn't phase her, and stealing it was. He was engaged to be married shortly to a woman he'd known most of his life.

In the prologue we find out that Grace and two other women on the boat are in jail awaiting trial for their lives, that Grace's husband is dead, and that her lawyer wants her to write a narrative of her time at sea. This narrative is the book we read. They are on trial for throwing others overboard to save their own lives. How can we believe Grace's tale completely for she is of shaky moral grounding. Couldn't this narrative be written to put her in a good light and make others look bad.

The book reminded me a bit of William Golding's `Lord of the Flies', where a group of boys find themselves stranded on an island and make a government for themselves that subsequently implodes. On the rescue ship, the leadership of Hardie is questioned and after a while two women, Hannah and Mrs. Grant try a coup. Things go from bad to worse. I was also reminded of the great painting by Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa. According to Wikipedia, it depicts the aftermath of a shipwreck where those who survived endured starvation, dehydration, cannibalism and madness.

This is a very readable book, a page-turner, grabbing the reader from page one. It is a book about morality, about the decisions we must make when in dire circumstances and what happens to people when they are placed in life-threatening situations. It is a book about choices and opportunities, faith and fatality. How close is a human being to an animal when placed in a dire situation? The author, Charlotte Rogan is a fine writer with a wonderful grasp of philosophy and psychology. You would never know that this was her first novel.
This book is a study in moral psychology.

If you enjoy novels that refuse to serve up easy answers to some of the most profound questions at the core of human experience, then this book is for you. In Rogan's The Lifeboat, there are no absolute heros or villains. Instead, the main characters are portrayed as a complex hybrid of good and evil--parceled out layer by layer. In the end, the characters and the narrative force the reader to ask whether her own morality would hold up under more extraordinary circumstances, thus raising the question of whether most people's moral identities are clouded by the distance between them and truly devastating decisions/circumstances.

The novel is written in a style that echoes the early 1800s, which I loved, but if you dislike that period in English literature, this book might not be for you. I thought it was both extraordinarily well written and deeply thought provoking. Definitely worth the read.