Early on in Every Man for Himself, Morgan, the novel's narrator, takes a tour of the lower decks of the Titanic with his friend Charlie Melchett. Having inspected the innards of the ship, including the engine room with "its thunderous intestines of lubricated pistons and crank-shafts pounding and pumping in perpetual motion", he is "dazzled". "I was thinking that if the fate of man was connected to the order of the universe, and if one could equate the scientific workings of the engines with just such a reciprocal universe, why then, nothing could go wrong with my world."
What a vignette of doomed arrogance! What Edwardian hubris! Except that Bainbridge is far too clever and strange to make such conventional use of the story of the Titanic. For you can hear that the narrator is looking back knowingly on his own self-delusion ("I was thinking . . ."). He knows what will happen in the end, and his knowledge shapes what he tells us. Some of the wealthy passengers have laid bets on the exact time of arrival in New York, and one of them presses the ship's purser for his estimate. "'Tuesday night, yes. Barring accidents,' at which they both laughed." Think of the narrator tacitly knowing the voyage's outcome and his report of this exchange becomes almost sardonic.
Morgan has worked in the drawing office at Harland and Wolff, where the Titanic was built. So near the end, when the ship has struck the iceberg, he can understand what is happening to it. He wanders among his variously amused or bemused fellow passengers, gifted with foreknowledge. The "unsinkable vessel" was indeed "now doomed", and "unfortunately carried insufficient life-boats to accommodate all on board". But he has always known better than the other characters. The novel's very structure requires us to notice his foreknowledge.
It begins with a prologue, in which the Titanic is sinking and Morgan sees the mysterious Scurra for the last time before the sea sweeps him away. "I fancy he was smiling, but I cant be sure. Possibly I need to believe it ended that way." Morgan looks back from beyond that ending, knowing from the outset exactly where the story is leading. Uses of the present tense ("thinking about it now . . .", "I remember . . .") throughout the novel remind you that he narrates in a different time from the events themselves.
There are two kinds of first-person narrator: those who tell you about their knowledge of future events, and those who do not. Morgan is the latter, but this is reticence, not ignorance. He must notice the occasional warnings of "ice ahead", even if he never comments on them. The Titanic, with its idle rich passengers and their freight of luxuries, may be a ship of fools, but the narrator is no fool. "At the end of the table Mrs Carter was shuddering in mock horror. Apparently the journalist Stead had once written a short story about a ship hit by an iceberg which she claimed to have read." Is there something sadistic in the recollection of this fragment? "'I can't remember the ending,' she cried, 'but I know I had nightmares for weeks.'"
Reflecting on a comment passed by the arriviste dress-designer Rosenfelder, Morgan observes, "It was as though the tailor had prior knowledge of the disaster about to overtake me." But this is a joke about foreknowledge, and not at all the disaster that we think of. In fact the narrator is thinking of his discovery that Wallis Ellery, the woman with whom he is infatuated, is having an affair with Scurra. (The discovery is painfully experienced: Morgan, concealed in Wallis's bedroom, has to listen in horror to their coupling in the next room.) But the narrator has been convinced that "It's bunkum to suppose we can be touched by tragedies other than our own".
The peculiarities of Morgan's own childhood history, only gradually revealed in the course of the novel, have convinced our narrator that he is "special". "I was destined to be a participant rather than a spectator of singular events." He instances two separate suicides that he witnessed as an infant, early testimonies that he would be intimate with others' despair and death. It is his own story that interests him. So what intrigues and puzzles him is what is past, not what is to come.
• John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Join him for a discussion on Wednesday 14 January at the Scott Room, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Doors open at 6.30pm, and the talk begins at 7pm. Entry costs 8 (including a glass of wine). To reserve a ticket email book.club@theguardian.com or phone 020 3353 2881.
