The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The sinking of Edwardian certainty
Even as Titanic survivors watched the ship go down, they spotted the symbolism. Frances Wilson reports
THE DARKSOME BOUNDS OF A FAILING WORLD by Gareth Russell 464pp, William Collins, £25, ebook £14.99
Some 20 years ago, a satirical magazine called The Onion ran a spoof headline: “World’s largest metaphor hits iceberg: Titanic, representation of man’s hubris, sinks in North Atlantic. 1,500 dead in symbolic tragedy”. In a sense, there is little more to say about the night of
April 14-15 1912, but that doesn’t stop us from returning again and again to the 10-second encounter between the world’s largest moving object and the 1.5 milliontonne iceberg.
The ship was on her maiden voyage, the iceberg was seeded from snow that first fell 100,000 years before. It was a case of age versus beauty, nature versus culture, and the 300ft gash on the Titanic’s starboard side sounded, as one passenger recalled, “like the scraping of a nail along metal”. It’s no wonder we keep raising the Titanic, only to watch her sink again.
There have been other disasters since then, but, as Gareth Russell explains, “something shattered” when Titanic sank; a “certainty had vanished”. Not only did Edwardian certainty shatter and vanish with theatrical splendour, but it did so in a performance replete with heroes and villains, which – like a play – took two and half hours from the scraping of the nail to the breaking of the ship. Witnesses recalled the brightness of the stars, the stillness of the sea, the glamour of the leviathan as she glittered, went black, and then disappeared without leaving so much as a wrinkle on the water. The sinking of the Titanic looked, to the audience in the lifeboats, horribly like a film. Only 29 days later, one of the survivors, a film star called Dorothy Gibson, starred as herself in a movie called Saved from the Titanic, in which she wore the same white dress she had worn on the night of the wreck.
The story, as Russell reminds us, has everything: Titanic was built in Ireland, registered in England and owned by the United States. Both immigrant tanker and luxury liner, she carried, like Noah’s Ark, the whole world, and was structured like the modern state. For GK Chesterton, Titanic and the state were alike in their “power and impotence, security and insecurity”; they each indulged the rich, who occupied the top of the pile, and turned a blind eye to the poor, who were hidden beneath. Titanic also, in a more literal sense, contained everything: 200,000 letters and packages, 3,000 sauce boats, 40,000 fresh eggs… the whole story can be reduced to numbers.
How to write about the world’s most symbolic tragedy without producing another Encyclopaedia Titanica? Russell sets out to look at the night through the experiences of six first-class passengers, his aim being to focus his gaze on “the unsettled world of the Edwardian upper classes”. His cast contains Thomas Andrews, the maritime architect who designed the ship,