A Night To Remember (book) - Critical Commentaries

Critical Commentaries

The book received widespread praise from contemporary critics. The New York Times called it "stunning ... one of the most exciting books of this or any other year". The Atlantic Monthly praised the book for doing "a magnificent job of re-creative chronicling, enthralling from the first word to the last." Entertainment Weekly said that it was "seamless and skillful... it's clear why this is many a researcher's Titanic bible", while USA Today described it as "the most riveting narrative of the disaster."

The secret to Lord's success, according to the New York Herald Tribune's critic Stanley Walker, was that he used "a kind of literary pointillism, the arrangement of contrasting bits of fact and emotion in such a fashion that a vividly real impression of an event is conveyed to the reader." Walker highlighted the way that Lord had avoided telling the story through the prism of social class, which had been the usual style of previous narratives, and instead successfully depicted the human element of the story by showing how those aboard reacted to the disaster whatever their class.

Steven Biel, an American cultural historian, notes the novelistic way in which Lord tells the story. The book depicts events through the eyes of multiple individuals, violating simple chronology to present an overlapping series of narratives. Nathaniel Philbrick, writing in the introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition of A Night to Remember, notes that at the time of publication it was the first significant book about Titanic for nearly forty years. He argues that the book's hallmarks are its restraint, brevity and readability, which downplays the extravagant and mythical aspects of the disaster and instead puts in the foreground the stories of the people on the ship. The narrative builds suspense, making the reader care about the characters and revisit the disaster from their perspective. It tells the story in a highly visual and aural way, describing the sights and sounds of the night of the disaster "with the immediacy of a live broadcast or a television documentary", as Biel puts it.

A key to Lord's method is his technique of adopting an unconventional approach to the chronology of the event, " an imaginative approach to time and space in which hours and minutes prove extremely malleable, the ship itself seems almost infinitely complex, and the disaster assumes order and unity from far away." In short it is "a modernist narrative around a modernist event." Reviewers highlighted the way in which Lord depicted the human side of the Titanic story, which The New York Times called "the core of Mr. Lord's account, and explains its fascination, a pull as powerful in its way as the last downward plunge of the ship itself." While the "legendary acts of gallantry" stood out, the book invites readers to put themselves in the place of those aboard and implicitly asks how they would react in the same situation. As Newsweek put it, "What would it be like to be aboard a sinking ocean liner?"

The significance of Lord's book, according to Biel, is that it "gave the disaster its fullest retelling since 1912 and made it speak to a modern mass audience and a new set of postwar concerns. In the creation of the Titanic myth there were two defining moments: 1912, of course, and 1955." Lord updates the popular interpretation of the Titanic disaster by portraying it in world-historical terms as the symbolic and actual end of an era, and as an event which "marked the end of a general feeling of confidence." Uncertainty replaced orderliness, and the ship's sinking marked the beginning of the twentieth century's "unending sequence of disillusionment. Before the Titanic, all was quiet. Afterward, all was tumult." Biel notes that Lord's underlying theme is a rather nostalgic reflection of the "nobler instincts" exhibited in the disaster and their subsequent eclipse. Such ideals were attractive for a post-war society that celebrated the role of the nuclear family and the traditional roles of the male breadwinner and female homemaker.

Lord's invocation of an era of confidence and certainty was also a relevant theme at the height of the Cold War. The University of California sociologist Fred Davis comments that nostalgia "thrives ... on the rude transitions wrought by such phenomena as war, depression, civil disturbance, and cataclysmic natural disasters – in short, those events that cause masses of people to feel uneasy and to wonder whether the world and their being are quite what they always took them to be." The turmoil and uncertainty of the early Atomic Age and the onset of profound social changes made the old concepts of the nuclear family and traditional gender roles, reflected in the behaviour of Titanic's passengers, resonate with a mid-1950s audience.

The gradual nature of the disaster was also more comforting, in some respects, compared with the nature of modern technological failures such as air crashes. Time's reviewer made this point explicitly: "This air age, when death comes too swiftly for heroism or with no survivors to record it, can still turn with wonder to an age before yesterday when a thousand deaths at sea seemed the very worst the world must suffer." It was, as Steven Biel comments, "a quainter kind of disaster" in which the victims had time to prepare and chose how to die.