He also has connections with the Titanic’s shipbuilders and so worked for a while in the drawing office at Harland and Wolff. His parents both soon died and he spent some time in an orphanage before being plucked from there and brought up by his aunt. Narrator J Pierrepoint Morgan has an interesting past – his mother married someone of whom her family disapproved and she was estranged from them. The book also incidentally acts as a portrait of the lifestyle and relatively vacuous activities of the moneyed classes who occupied the Titanic’s first class cabins and salons. Moreover, the voyage and the sinking are almost incidental to the plot which focuses – as do all the best novels – on human relationships. Any misgivings were soon assuaged however as the quality of Bainbridge’s writing is apparent from the start. I wasn’t at all sure about picking this up, still less reading it, because its ostensible subject matter – the sinking of the Titanic – is such well-worn ground.
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