Every Man For Himself was the winner of the 1996 Whitbread Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in that year.

For the four fraught, mysterious days of her doomed maiden voyage in 1912, the Titanic sails towards New York, glittering with luxury, freighted with millionaires and hopefuls. In her labyrinthine passageways the last, secret hours of a small group of passengers are played out, their fate sealed in prose of startling, sublime beauty, as Beryl Bainbridge’s haunting masterpiece moves inexorably to its known and terrible end.

This is one of her historical novels, so it’s no surprise that this is a disaster novel. It’s the story of Morgan’s voyage divided into four days as he tells it. It’s mainly the story of the young rich people as they drink and party their way across the Atlantic. Morgan is part of the crowd but he is not rich, and although he has connections, he’s a young American who has to earn his living. We only see a glimpse into his background and I found it confusing for quite a way into the book. But eventually we learn more about him and things became clearer,

By the time he writes about day 4, the sinking itself, the pace speeds up, and the story came to life for me. I think Bainbridge conveys what it must have been like –

There was such a dearth of information, of confirmation or denial of rumours – the racquet court was under water but not the Turkish baths; a spur of the iceberg had ripped the ship from one end to the other but the crew was fully equipped to make good the damage and were even now putting it to rights – and such an absence of persons in authority to whom one might turn that it was possible to imagine the man in the golfing jacket had spoken no more than the truth when presupposing we were victims of a hoax. (page 179)

I could easily imagine what it was like to be a passenger, people rushing about the boat, trying to get on the lifeboats and being separated from friends and family. And the final scenes bring home the reality that it really was a case of every man for himself with the callous attitude towards the steerage passengers, the lack of lifeboats and the disregard of the ice warnings. And so the boat described as unsinkable, sank.