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Summary
Summary
In the summer of 1914, Grace elopes with Henry Winter in London, hoping to escape the disapproval of his wealthy family. When the elegant ocean liner carrying them home to America suffers a mysterious explosion, Henry sacrifices his own safety and secures Grace a seat in a lifeboat, which its occupants quickly realize is over capacity. For any to live, some must die. Adrift on the Atlantic, the weather deteriorating and supplies dwindling, the castaways scheme and battle, caught up in a vicious power struggle between a ruthless but experienced sailor and an enigmatic matron with surprising powers of persuasion. Choosing a side will seal her fate, but Grace has made her way in the world by seizing every possible advantage. As she recollects the unorthodox way she and Henry met and considers the new life of privilege she thought she'd found, Grace must now decide: will she pay any price to keep it? The Lifeboat is a masterful debut, a story of hard choices, ambition, and endurance, narrated by a woman as complex and unforgettable as the events she describes.
Summary
In the summer of 1914, the elegant ocean liner carrying Grace Winter and her husband Henry across the Atlantic suffers a mysterious explosion. Setting aside his own safety, Henry secures Grace a place in a lifeboat, which the survivors quickly realize is over capacity. For any to live, some must die. As the castaways battle the elements and each other, Grace recollects the way she and Henry met, and the new life of privilege she thought she'd found. Will she pay any price to keep it?
Author Notes
Charlotte Rogan graduated from Princeton in 1975. She taught herself to write between working at various jobs and bringing up triplets. Her childhood vacations with a family of sailors provided inspiration for 'The Lifeboat', her first novel. She lives in Westport, Connecticut with her husband.
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
It was Richard Crossman who in 1971 called secrecy the "real English disease". "Real" because at that time the English disease was generally supposed to be strikes. Government secrecy - which this book is about - blanketed vast areas of British public life for most of the last century, upheld by a fierce and undiscriminating Official Secrets Act, passed through parliament by underhand means in 1911 (the government of the day pretended it was just to stop German spies), and by the gentlemanly code of those in the know. The latter were so secretive that the rest of us weren't even told what was being kept secret, with the very existence of agencies such as SIS, MI5 and GCHQ remaining hidden. (Of course a lot of people guessed.) Thus armed, a supposedly democratic state could - the argument went - keep us safe from foreign plots, and also - though this was less trumpeted - from domestic subversion: for example, through strikes. If anything, the growth of democracy made this worse, because it threatened to undermine the elite's exclusive control over politically sensitive knowledge. In all the battles over secrecy detailed in this book, a class-war element is obvious. It was them - the elite - against us. (Or us against them, the plebs, if you've strayed over here from the Times.) It wasn't, however, the plebs who first started spilling the beans. The upper classes have always relied too much on their own closed system of "honour": witness MI5's notorious failure to credit that the Cambridge-educated Kim Philby could be a traitor until it was too late. Some early whistle-blowers did come from the middle and lower orders of society, which the civil service was forced to trawl for recruits as it expanded, but the worst offenders were some of the elite themselves. It started with Churchill's and Lloyd George's post-first world war memoirs, which broke all the existing rules about divulging secret documents and private cabinet discussions, but couldn't be reined in because their authors were so high and mighty. That afforded the precedent for others: "If them, why not us?" A second breach was opened after the second world war by journalists, and especially Chapman Pincher of the Daily Express, who is the undoubted hero of this book. Moran has interviewed him extensively, and appears to trust his every word: "at the risk of sounding sycophantic", he writes at one point, which I'm afraid he does, rather. It was Pincher who sparked the "D-notice" affair in 1967 when he revealed, in defiance of a D-notice - the semi-formal device that was supposed to prevent this sort of scoop - that the state was routinely intercepting private cables and telegrams. Moran calls this "the British Watergate", though that seems an exaggeration. Thereafter "investigative journalists", aided by aggrieved civil servants, started queuing up to dish the spooks. The government at first responded by wheeling out its major weapon, the Official Secrets Act, but with some embarrassing results. The D-notice affair was one. Another was Thatcher's pursuit of Peter Wright over his memoir of his time in MI5, even as far as an Australian court of law (albeit on a different charge), where it came to an ignoble end. Thatcher was an absolutist when it came to secrecy, as with much else. So was the cabinet secretary Burke Trend, who supported the existing Official Secrets Act as a deterrent, much like the "cane in the best type of orthodox school". So we know where he came from. They were both wrong, and it wasn't long before the other ex-public schoolboys in Whitehall came to see this. So they adopted another strategy entirely, which was to open government up to an extent, but always in ways they could control. The new Official Secrets Act of 1989 removed some of the more ridiculous aspects of the old one - such as forbidding the revelation of anything that was done in Whitehall (paperclip purchases, for example) - but at the same time tightened it, by disallowing a "public interest" defence in the cases it still covered. Then they - specifically, the secretary of the D-notice committee - wined and dined journalists to appeal to their patriotism to keep stumm. Apparently even Private Eye was nobbled this way. Chapman Pincher was also kept on side by feeding him privileged information - not always accurate. Even more subtle was the wheeze of allowing certain academics and others access to the secret archives and permission publish from them, so long as they were "trustworthy"; that is, "writers would be selected for their willingness to portray things in a positive light". (Generally, anyway; you needed some criticism to make it convincing.) This culminated in a series of handsome "official histories" of the secret services (of which one of the most recent is Christopher Andrew's The Defence of the Realm, on MI5). Most independent historians are unhappy with this - Moran claims it's because of "the acid of envy" - but he thinks it's OK. A problem, of course, is that other historians are unable to check these books' findings, which is a slight problem with Moran's work too, with its occasional references to "private sources" and interviews with Pincher. The argument in favour, of course, is that it's better to have sanitised information than none. The government was allowed to appear more "open", and to bruit some of its secret services' undoubted wartime achievements, which the Americans just then were shamelessly appropriating (viz the later Hollywood movie U-571). That would be good for the spooks' morale. So far as we know, this book hasn't been "authorised", but it occasionally reads as if it could have been. Some of its omissions are surprising: domestic surveillance of the left, for example, and derring-do in Ireland, both of which the secret services were nervous about, and may be thought to make them less trustworthy (and so less deserving of secrecy). Another is the radical press, which also played a part in unmasking their naughtier enterprises, but which Moran merely dismisses as "trendy". He has the conventional elite view of Harold Wilson as a paranoid conspiracy theorist, without making allowance for the venomous hatred that Wilson attracted among the classes who made up the secret services and controlled the press in his time. Moran may have got this from Pincher (Wilson certainly hated him). This bears comparison with the hostility that President Obama arouses among American Republicans, and for a similar reason: race in Obama's case, class in Wilson's. Moran also rather undermines his "paranoid" charge by confirming that Wilson's own D-notice secretary was, in fact, plotting with others to bring him down. One day we may look back on Wilson more charitably, especially in the light of those who followed him. Perhaps Moran is trying to establish his own "trustworthy" credentials for when the next tranche of secret-service history commissions comes along. If so, good luck to him. I for one won't be at all envious. This is a well-researched and fascinating book, despite the blinkers. And it ends with a note of caution for those of us liberal historians who might otherwise naturally place ourselves on the "open government" rather than the "secret state" side of this argument. The more "open" government becomes - in the sense of its written records being available to everyone - the less likely our governors are to write things down. That will seriously cripple future historians and anyone wanting to find out how government works. For this reason, as Moran puts it, if WikiLeaks is permitted to reveal all, "society will have paid a very high price indeed for Assange's crusade". Whether that price outweighs the benefits of rulers having to act responsibly, because the people are watching them, is the central issue here. To order Classified for pounds 25 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Bernard Porter Caption: Captions: Smoke and mirrors . . . Moran confirms that Harold Wilson (left), pictured with Lyndon B Johnson, was the victim of a plot The government at first responded by wheeling out its major weapon, the Official Secrets Act, but with some embarrassing results. The D-notice affair was one. Another was Thatcher's pursuit of Peter Wright over his memoir of his time in MI5, even as far as an Australian court of law (albeit on a different charge), where it came to an ignoble end. Thatcher was an absolutist when it came to secrecy, as with much else. So was the cabinet secretary Burke Trend, who supported the existing Official Secrets Act as a deterrent, much like the "cane in the best type of orthodox school". So we know where he came from. They were both wrong, and it wasn't long before the other ex-public schoolboys in Whitehall came to see this. So they adopted another strategy entirely, which was to open government up to an extent, but always in ways they could control. The new Official Secrets Act of 1989 removed some of the more ridiculous aspects of the old one - such as forbidding the revelation of anything that was done in Whitehall (paperclip purchases, for example) - but at the same time tightened it, by disallowing a "public interest" defence in the cases it still covered. Then they - specifically, the secretary of the D-notice committee - wined and dined journalists to appeal to their patriotism to keep stumm. Apparently even Private Eye was nobbled this way. [Chapman Pincher] was also kept on side by feeding him privileged information - not always accurate. Even more subtle was the wheeze of allowing certain academics and others access to the secret archives and permission publish from them, so long as they were "trustworthy"; that is, "writers would be selected for their willingness to portray things in a positive light". (Generally, anyway; you needed some criticism to make it convincing.) This culminated in a series of handsome "official histories" of the secret services (of which one of the most recent is Christopher Andrew's The Defence of the Realm, on MI5). Most independent historians are unhappy with this - [Moran] claims it's because of "the acid of envy" - but he thinks it's OK. A problem, of course, is that other historians are unable to check these books' findings, which is a slight problem with Moran's work too, with its occasional references to "private sources" and interviews with Pincher. The argument in favour, of course, is that it's better to have sanitised information than none. The government was allowed to appear more "open", and to bruit some of its secret services' undoubted wartime achievements, which the Americans just then were shamelessly appropriating (viz the later Hollywood movie U-571). That would be good for the spooks' morale. - Bernard Porter.
New York Review of Books Review
"A SINGULAR disadvantage of the sea," Stephen Crane wrote in his 1897 story "The Open Boat," based on his experiences on a lifeboat off the coast of Florida, "lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important." The unrelenting sea and its vast indifference to the shipwrecked is a subject that has always attracted both writers and readers. We are fascinated, and appalled, by how quickly men and women are brought to a childlike state, curled in tight on themselves and unable to call on their own free will, sanity or morality. Most riveting of all, perhaps, is the tension that emerges between extreme emotional and physical reduction and an expanded, even predatory, desire to survive. Grace Winter, the antiheroine of Charlotte Rogan's impressive, harrowing first novel, "The Lifeboat," is nothing if not a survivor. Twenty-two years old and clearly very attractive, she narrates the book with panache - and a good dose of unreliability - insisting she lives by the principle "God helps those who help themselves." When the ocean liner transporting Grace and her (very rich) new husband to the United States on the eve of World War I suffers a catastrophic explosion, she wedges herself into Lifeboat 14, along with 38 others. There she staves off the mounting hysteria around her and aligns herself with John Hardie, an experienced sailor who takes control of the food and water and makes instantaneous, God-like decisions. He steers the boat away from a boy clinging to a plank and, shortly after, delivers a brutal kick to the face of a swimmer trying to climb aboard. In fact, as Grace and her fellow castaways soon discover, they are already perilously overcrowded. For any to survive, a few must volunteer to go over the side, and you can bet Grace won't be one of them. "If Mr. Hardie hadn't beaten people away," she admits with delicious coolness, "I would have had to do it myself." FRAMED by scenes of Grace after the ordeal - she has been charged, along with two other survivors, with the murder of one of their companions - the bulk of the novel traps us in the disintegrating world of the lifeboat, buffeted by squalls and by a brewing power struggle between the darkly appealing Mr. Hardie and an unflappable older woman named Mrs. Grant. With this clashing surrogate father and mother, Rogan dramatizes the novel's central moral issue: is it ethically acceptable to allow (or compel) the weakest to die so the majority may live? She refuses to make absolute judgments, leaving the verdict in our hands. Rogan writes viscerally about the desperate condition of the castaway, of what it is like to be "surrounded on four sides by walls of black water" or to be so thirsty your tongue swells to the size of "a dried and hairless mouse." But it's her portrait of Grace, who is by turns astute, conniving, comic and affecting, that drives the book. Like her literary forebear Becky Sharp, Grace wants a great deal from this life and feels justified in using whatever wiles might be necessary to secure her own happy ending. Of her seduction of her husband she explains: "I had worn a pale dress and outlined my eyes so they looked big in my ashen face. It wasn't a costume or disguise, exactly, but a form of communication." As Rogan proves with this indelible character, there's a profound truth and even beauty in Grace's degree of self-loyalty. Our humanity demands resistance to the forces that would obliterate us. Or, as Crane's protagonist in "The Open Boat" cries to a universe he knows is deaf and implacable: "Yes, but I love myself." Sarah Towers teaches creative writing at the Bard Prison Initiative.
