The Lifeboat

Historical disasters lurk just behind the fictional disaster at the center of Charlotte Rogan's The Lifeboat.  It is 1914, and WWI has just begun.  Characters note the similarity between their plight, adrift in a lifeboat after their ocean liner (Empress Alexandra) sinks, and that of those aboard The Titanic; by the end of the novel, the Lusitania will have been destroyed.  (And, of course, the Empress Alexandra's fate hints at what will shortly happen to the Romanovs.)  This lifeboat floats in a world which is already dangerously unpredictable, even murderous.  Under the circumstances, it is no surprise that the increasingly dog-eat-dog environment of the lifeboat turns out to be a microcosm of the destabilized world outside of it.

Our narrator, Grace Winter, is both ironically and aptly named: ironically, because her status as a divine gift is rather dubious; aptly, because her narrative voice is consistently cool, detached, clinical.  Most of her narrative reconstructs the over two weeks she and (initially) thirty-nine other people spent aboard the lifeboat--a narrative she writes at the behest of her lawyers, as she and two other women are on trial for premediated murder.  Grace is intrigued by another passenger's account of Aristotle's distinction between "memory" and "recollecting," in which "[r]ecollecting...is the recovery itself--the investigation or mnemonic process that leads one to a memory that is not instantly retrievable" (53), and she explicitly calls attention to moments in her narrative in which her telling contradicts those of the other passengers.  Moreover, she concedes, the nature of sense impressions makes "failure to remember" a "natural consequence of necessity" (64): in other words, there will be certain insuperable gaps in her retrospective ordering of events.  At this point, readers may sigh at the prospect of yet another unreliable narrator.  Or narrators, since storytelling onboard the lifeboat tends to warp the past rather than transmit it: one prominent character, Mrs. Grant (with whom Grace is on trial), may have "appropriated" an anecdote about the Titanic (45); other characters similarly "appropriate" one person's tale and "pass it on as his or her own, and of course the stories changed as a result" (82). Agency becomes problematic, the past becomes volatile, one person's life becomes another's. How convenient, the reader sighs again; of course, she is on trial for murder, and this is in her own best interest, no? 

Indeed.  In fact, I would argue, this novel calls the politics of unreliable narration into question, precisely because this pose of unknowability turns out to be intricately bound up with Grace Winter's pragmatic, self-interested embrace of survival and success at all costs.  In parodically good American fashion, Grace rejoices in the mantra of "God helps those who help themselves!": "It was a principle I lived by, and while it sometimes might make a person who espoused it seem selfish and theologically uninformed, people who refused to live by it looked, to me, weak and parasitic" (100).  For Grace, who repeatedly derides other characters, male and female, for their "weakness," victory over circumstances at any price is the only criterion for success.  Thus, the Deacon, who willingly consigns himself to the depths in order to help save the rest of the boat's inhabitants, is a "weak" man; so too is her sister Miranda, who responds to the collapse of the family fortunes by promptly getting herself a governessing job.  From Grace's POV, both characters give in to the overwhelming force of circumstances, without calculating (as in the case of the Deacon selflessly dying for the others) whether the self-sacrifice is even worth the effort.  By contrast, Grace's admittedly calculated pursuit of her first husband, Henry, who does not survive the sinking, is intended to restore her lost life of privilege (now improved a thousandfold) through marriage to a rich banker--even though the marriage comes at the expense of Henry's fiancee, Felicity.  Her willingness to trample others in her quest for financial and social stability prefigures her actions aboard the lifeboat itself: at one point, she tries to use sleep suggestion in order to persuade a woman to jump overboard; later, she collaborates with two other women, Hannah and Mrs. Grant, in murdering Mr. Hardie, the only actual sailor on the lifeboat. 

The murder challenges Grace's understanding of her motives, for in order to be found innocent, she cannot be one of the agents who plots Hardie's death--and yet, by her own admission, she actively participates in strangling him and then shoving him overboard.  In retrospect, Grace denies her own "power" (191); instead, she focuses on the "approval" she receives from Hannah and Mrs. Grant, in which she is "warmed and embraced" (195) by them like all of the other women on the boat had been.   Calling her own agency into question is politic.  At the same time, she emphasizes her desire to conform, to be like the other women, in much the same way that she desires to solve her financial woes through marriage instead of labor.  Significantly, Hannah and Mrs. Grant don't conform to gender stereotypes: Hannah's first interactions with Grace seem seductive, and she dons "trousers" (250) for the trial; Mrs. Grant is a dominating figure who actively contests Hardie's power.  By contrast, husband-hunting aside, Grace trots out religious cliches when it benefits her (237) and wears appropriately sedate dresses, part of her attorney's strategy to "distinguish me from the other two women" by casting her as ideally feminine (250).  Despite the various dollops of "down with the patriarchy" sentiment (up to and including the women overriding the men on the boat), Grace succeeds by seizing on the status quo. 

Grace concludes her narrative by sneering at her psychiatrist's "childish desire to know," and that summary dismissal heightens the power play involved in her unreliability. For two of the things she professes not to "know" are why she was on the boat in the first place, and what is in Mr. Hardie's mysterious box.  The emotionally fragile Mrs. Fleming, who initially says it was "best to know" (59) that her daughter Emmy was dead, announces that Grace is only on the boat because Henry "said something" to Mr. Hardie.  "What was the conversation about, Grace? We'd all like to know" (60), Mrs. Fleming cries, and Grace initially denies that she knows anything about why she is on the lifeboat.  Strictly speaking, it is of no use to "know" the answer to this question after the fact--and yet, as we discover at the end of the novel, Grace surely does know that Henry paid off Hardie with the contents (probably jewels) of the concealed box.  By splitting hairs--"he and Hardie had exchanged words, which I didn't hear except to ascertain that some kind of transaction had taken place" (268)--Grace can maintain a kind of willed innocence, a refusal to acknowledge that her husband's privilege and power bought her life.  (And, one could add, an equal refusal to acknowledge that she murdered the man who, for his own reasons, agreed to save her.)  Her unreliability does not prevent us from "knowing"; instead, it is a performance that keeps her conveniently free to recraft her own life as she sees fit, liberated from the peskier reflections that self-knowledge might bring.