For the young man is surely about to participate in a major world event by boarding Titanic on her maiden voyage.Īlthough we are soon aware that Morgan is not quite the same as his upper class friends, he fits seamlessly into first class. When a man dies in his arms shortly before he is to return to the States, he leaves his uncle's house almost secretly (a stolen picture of his mother tucked away) and gets the milk train to Southampton. Morgan, who feels, 'destined to be a participant rather than a spectator of singular events'. It tells the story of Morgan, a relative of J.P. This short, almost restrained, novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Prize when published in 1996. This never made the book unreadable but was decidedly annoying. Incidentally, I was not impressed by the print quality in this Abacus paperback edition - many of the pages suffered from a rather distracting column of slightly squashed characters down the middle, which suggests that there may have been a paper or printer fault somewhere. The tone is less overtly comic than Bainbridge's early novels, but there are still plenty of funny moments. The story is largely a microcosm of the British class system, and the disaster prefigures its wider collapse into the Great War, as loss of face outweighs technical concerns and the comfort and social experience of the first class passengers is paramount.

His journey is somewhat picaresque - he spends most of the voyage scheming, drinking, gambling and chasing women, and any heroic qualities he has only emerge near the end as he helps co-ordinate the evacuation and contrives an unlikely Hollywood style escape that conveniently allows him to live to tell the tale.

The story of the maiden voyage of the Titanic is a familiar one, but Bainbridge still managed an impressively fresh reimagination of the personal experiences of a rich young Anglo-American who has been adopted by the family of J.P.

Every man for himself book