Book Eighteen

The Lifeboat
Charlotte Rogan

The premise of The Lifeboat reminds me of one of those moral dilemmas that often come out when people are around a campfire or in a car together for too long: imagine you're in a lifeboat with a priest, a doctor, a mother, and it will sink unless you get rid of one person.  Whom do you choose?

While the book ends up differently than that, it does present the same underlying question: are you a murderer if you survive at the cost of other lives?  Set in the summer of 1914, The Lifeboat is, in part, the diary of Grace Winter as she recalls the days following the sinking of the ocean liner upon which she and her brand new husband were passengers.  Grace finds herself in a lifeboat along with 38 other passengers.  It quickly becomes clear that the boat, while "built for 40" was in fact not meant to hold more than 30 or so people.  As she writes from a prison cell where she awaits her trial and verdict for murdering one of the passengers, she recounts the storms, power struggles, lives, and deaths of the others aboard the small vessel. 

Interspersed with these chapters, the reader learns about Grace's husband and their elopement to London and a bit about Grace's life before that.  Beyond that background knowledge about Grace, Charlotte Rogan does not give the reader any insight--beyond gossip shared by the other passengers--into the lives of the others hoping for rescue and fighting for survival.  Thus, the reader is left to pass judgement and draw conclusions about the motives and justifications of the others.  I closed The Lifeboat on its final page without answering many of the questions about those very judgements and conclusions, which, I suppose, is where Grace was left as well.

At its heart, this is a story about survival.  It's about Grace's survival on the lifeboat, but it's also about our very own survival.  What would you do if your boat is over capacity and dangerously close to sinking and you see a child in the water, close enough to reach and pull into your boat?  What would you do if you know the boat will sink unless someone gets off and the "captain" asks for volunteers?  What would you do if the most powerful person on the boat--the very person who would help you survive--told you to throw someone who endangered that survival overboard?  How far would you go to survive?  And, once you had, could you live with what you had done?