Book 14: A Night to Remember

A Night to Remember

Walter Lord

As a major fan of the 1997 movie, I couldn't let the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's sinking go by unnoticed, and I considered Walter Lord's classic post-sinking recap A Night to Remember a good place to start. From the start, it's obvious that the author did his homework: the book is built on a solid research foundation, though a number of inconsistencies in survivors' testimonies prove that the memory is fragile as a source of fact. Lord, however, wisely does not shy away from this fact, and though he tends to put the vast majority of his faith in these tales, 40 years old or more, he has few other options and does choose to briefly address the issues, though he quickly returns to parroting firsthand accounts. The main problem with the book, then, is not in the potential flaws in its story, unavoidable in an age without mobile video and in a story that has only its survivors available to tell the tale, but rather in its execution, for which Lord can be rightfully blamed. Faced with a huge number of precious firsthand anecdotes and primary documents about one of the most fascinating stories of the post-Gilded Era, one that in many ways serves as a microcosm of the whole period, Lord resorts to a bored, stifled prose driven not by narrative force but by his need to add just one more interesting tidbit. While we do follow certain survivors and famous casualties around the ship on that fateful night, the story (such as it is) doesn't so much "begin" or "open" as "commence," and the tragedies are reduced to newsflash microparagraphs, with related story after related story hitting in such quick succession that they quickly blend together. The effects can occasionally prove haunting, as a rapid-fire freeze frame of a crucial moment, but the entire night is reduced to a string of bite-sized pieces, dehumanized through too-intense magnification. What's worse, Lord butchers his attempt to place the sinking in its historical and historiographic contexts, placing his ruminative comments neither at the beginning nor end of the text, but rather right between the sinking and the rescue by the Carpathia. This dilutes the effect of the story, rather than enhancing it in the way I presume Lord intended, and though his thoughts are coherent and his points poignant, they get lost amidst the suspense of the suspended narrative. Nonetheless, while many of the finer points will be handily recognized by fans of Cameron's movie, the book is worth reading and does provide some moving insight into the sinking. Walter Lord is a capable writer, if not a particularly compelling one, and the story never stagnates of wallows, though it sometimes proceeds too rapidly to be truly effective. It is a bare-bones story told adequately but without exceptional literary skill. A Night to Remember is a solid condensing of survivor stories from one of the world's most captivating shipwrecks, and a good place to start for those looking for a firsthand glimpse of the ship's final, fateful hours.

Grade: B+