The Stranger in the Lifeboat (2021)
What looks like the mystery of a sinking ship is actually a story about faith and hope.
This book has two narratives running in parallel: a group of strangers huddled in a lifeboat after the sinking, and a detective on Montserrat who finds a notebook from one of the survivors when their raft washes ashore.
Three days after the sinking, the survivors spot a man floating in the water, and they pull him aboard. He claims to be the Lord, and they will be saved when they all believe in him. They die one-by-one until the narrator is the only person left alive; it’s later revealed that his renewed faith saves him, he washes ashore with the boat and then “discovers” it under an assumed name.
The detective who discovers his notebook and reads it in private has been struggling with grief after the loss of his daughter; he has a similar renewal of his faith.
In some sense, the book plays very fair: the stranger is very upfront that he’s the Lord and faith will save them, so I can’t be upset that faith resolves the story. But I still felt frustrated, perhaps because I was expecting a more traditional mystery about why the ship sank, which turns out to be a complete red herring – all the plot threads about sabotage and secret fathers and limpet mines ultimately come to nought.
I read this book quickly and I didn’t dislike it, but nor was I excited at the end.
Quotes
Page 23, when the owner of the sunk yacht confronts the mysterious stranger:
“Enough!” Lambert broke in. “If you know so much, tell me what happened to my damn yacht!”
The man smiled. “Why are you angry about that?”
“I lost my boat!”
“You are in another.”
“It’s not the same!”
“True,” the man said. “This one is still afloat.”
Page 36, when the narrator writes to his sweetheart Annabelle (who we will later learn died of a health issue for which he couldn’t afford treatment):
You were educated and accomplished and tender and beautiful, and I confess, from the moment I saw you, I felt unworthy of your affection. I never finished high school. I had few career options. My clothes were dull and worn out, and my bony frame and straggly hair were hardly attractive. But I instantly loved you, and incredibly, in time, you loved me back. It was the happiest I have ever been and the happiest I imagine I will ever be. Still, I always sensed I would disappoint you in some future way. I lived with that silent fear for four years, Annabelle, right until the day you left me. It’s been nearly ten months now, and I know it makes no sense writing. But it nourishes me through these lost nights. You once said, “We all need to hold on to something, Benji.” Let me hold on to you, that first hour of you, the two of us staring at a colorful sky. Let me finish my story. Then I will let go of you and this world.
Page 46, as the survivors realise that no rescue is coming:
I wonder if this is what dying is like, Annabelle. At first, you are so tightly connected to the world you cannot imagine letting go. In time, you surrender to a drifting phase. What comes next, I cannot say.
Some would say that you meet the Lord.
Page 87, a detail of the explosion:
The explosion had come during a dinner party, and the sight of most of us in dress clothes, now soaked and ripped as we huddled inside a raft, was a grim reminder of how little the natural world cares for our plans.
Page 139, when the narrator describes his mother’s industrial accident and subsequent depression:
My mother’s most repeated advice to me was this: “Find one person you can trust in your life.” She had been mine for my turbulent childhood, and I tried to be hers in the years she had left. After she died, I felt heavy all the time. My breathing was labored, my posture stooped. I worried that I was ill. I now realize that this was merely the weight of love that had nowhere to go.
Page 207, as the detective Fleur drives through the abandoned half of Montserrat, an unusual fact that holds true today:
Eventually, the jeepe reached Plymouth, once the largest town on the island. Four thousand people had lived here. Shops and restaurants had thrived. Now, like Pompeii, Plymouth was defined by its ashen ruins. Oddly enough, it remained the island’s official seat of government, but its population was zero, making it the world’s only ghost-town capital.