We will each, at one time in our lives, experience a pivotal moment, a maelstrom around which the fortunes of our existence swirl. For some of us, these will be tiny events -- the train we were late for that carried our soulmate, the promotion we missed out on because we were sick and didn't stand out in that impromptu meeting --, the futures that never happened. But for others, these will be colossal disturbances in civilization's tapestry, incidents that not only define our lives but ripple out, infecting the broader culture and impressing upon it lasting legacies. The former is far more common, but the latter is utterly unforgettable. And it is to this that we turn in Mr. Wilson's compelling biography of those who survived the most famous maritime disaster in recent history.
Even if Mr. Cameron's now famous 1997 blockbuster had not re-inflated the legend of the Titanic, the sinking of the unsinkable would still occupy a place of prominence on any list of the top five incidents in the 20th century. Though its sinking claimed the lives of only 1,500 souls, a mere trifle compared to the millions who would later die in the two world wars, and though there were no cameras to capture footage of its demise, tape to be replayed over and over again for a rapt audience, the downfall of the Titanic captured the attention of the western world. For this was, at least from the perspective of 1912, the dawn of the Machine Age, the beginning of the century of progress that would finally banish the pesky problems of starvation and death and deliver humanity into its deserved destiny. The Titanic was a ship for such an age, a sea-born palace, a paean to capitalist prosperity, an indomitable symbol that could not be smote. But then came the fateful night of the 15th of April, 1912, when, while steaming hard through the north Atlantic, it met its fate against that most ancient of Earthly steel; ice.
It was hubris that felled it; no, it was an inattentive captain. No, it was the arrogance of the ship's owner; no, it was dumb misfortune. Buckets of ink have been spilled upon countless sheets of paper in an attempt to eulogize the sinking of the Titanic. Its victims, from the rich to the small, have been memorialized even while its class prejudices have been picked apart, its luxuries marveled over, its errors bemoaned. But what about its survivors? What of them? Yes, they've been interviewed, their impressions preserved in the archives of libraries and television studios, but the attention paid to their accounts has been dwarfed by the sensationalism of the ship's demise and what it said about humanity. No longer. In this, a compilation of the life stories of a dozen men and women who survived this most infamous disaster, Mr. Wilson sets out to balance these most skewed scales.
From the privileged to the poor, from the brave to the cowardly, Mr. Wilson, here, plucks out the most compelling threads of the 710 people who survived the Titanic and, with the benefit of a hundred years of perspective, lays out for us their futures after the most harrowing night of their lives. Vividly, he captures the extent to which, for some, the Titanic became an obsession, an event revisited over and over again as a means of avoiding the fact that it would be their defining moment. For others, it became a shadow behind their eyes, a thing not spoken of, buried pain best confined to the past. And for those most sad few, it became a defining tragedy that claimed the lives of parents and children, friends and loved ones, a darkness endurable for only a short while. All of these narrative strands Mr. Wilson ably weaves into a work far more about survivor's guilt than about the Titanic itself. For here, the ship is merely a means by which to expose both the frailties of the human mind and the unknowable quirkiness of fate.
Shadow of The Titanic is a sad but moving expose. Yes, Mr. Wilson often overreaches, claiming to know the thoughts of his subjects even as they die. But I can forgive him this. After all, he has otherwise assembled an admirable catalogue of the various ways we all try to grapple with tragedy. For while we do generally fall into types, there is no one way to respond to disaster. We are all, in the end, the sum total of our experiences and the extent to which these have shaped our baseline personalities. This alchemy cannot be replicated. And thus, when struck by the hull of fate, we, like bits of ice, scatter in all directions, none of us precisely the same. Fascinating and engrossing. (3/5 Stars)
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