Rogan uses this setup in crosscutting ways, and at times it reads like an update of William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies,” the classic tale of British schoolboys’ primitive struggle for power and survival after becoming marooned on an uninhabited island.
Did her husband bribe the crew member, John Hardie, as he lowered Lifeboat 14 to the water? Speculation becomes fact, on this and other matters, as the 39 people (30 are women and one is a small boy) jammed into the lifeboat become a metaphor for a closed community in which idleness and fear warp minor details into intricate - and speculative - plots.
How Grace managed to get in the lifeboat is murky. We learn through her narrative that she was returning from London with her wealthy husband when the Empress Alexandra luxury liner suffered an unexplained explosion and sank in the North Atlantic.
The gist of the book is a narration Grace puts together at the behest of her lawyers as they try to find an argument to save her from the gallows for a crime yet to be revealed. We learn Winter had been recently married, and even more recently widowed, and as she leans her head back and opens her mouth to catch raindrops from a sudden downpour, we realize that she also is a little bit off. Grace Winter is on trial with two other women after being rescued from a lifeboat. The novel begins with, in a sense, the ending. And there are enough symbolism and metaphor here to keep a literature class busy for half a semester. But Rogan delivers something entirely different (rest easy, no one gets eaten) by using a familiar setting to explore moral ambiguity, human nature and the psychology of manipulation. The plot seems basic: Some people clamber aboard a lifeboat as a ship sinks, and we think we’re all set for a tale in which someone inevitably will be eaten for dinner. The most remarkable achievement within Charlotte Rogan’s debut novel, “The Lifeboat,” is how neatly it exceeds, and defies, expectations.
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