There is a series of gap-filled emotional transactions: Grace’s oddly suspect care of Mary Ann, a dependent fellow passenger her sudden unexplained attachment to Hannah, Ursula’s mutinous sidekick. There is the possibility, vaguely raised by Grace, that the two men were engaged in stealing the gold when the fire broke out.Īboard the lifeboat there is Grace’s shift of allegiance from Hardie to the mutinous Ursula, with enough left out to lead us to suspect sheer opportunism a self-preserving desertion from a strong leader once his strength begins to fail. There is Hardie’s wariness toward an officer in charge of another lifeboat and his refusal to let the two boats join forces. There are odd gaps in her account of shipboard life hints at a murky partnership between Henry and a banker colleague who are shipping two cases of gold back from Europe to the United States. Woven into Grace’s account of her happy new marriage are throwaway lines about how she had tracked the wealthy Henry, contrived a broken shoe as he passed on the street, and charmed him into falling in love and ditching his fiancée. Her story is the zigzag dance of a hunted bird leading us away from its nest except that we are not certain there is a nest much less what’s in it. Like the lifeboat, what she tells us has a hole in it, and through the hole, a murky current pours in so that at the end we get not resolution but a disquieting uncertainty.
But we don’t know just where the poison lodges what is true, what is bent truth, what is truth only partly disclosed, what is hidden. The story she feeds us is mesmerizing, unquestionably believable for the most part, yet poisoned, even in its most casual details.
Grace is a supremely unreliable narrator more than that, her very unreliability is unreliable.
But something else comes through as well, and this, rather than the story itself, is the novel’s undermining and deeply unsettling core. Rogan’s vivid, aching detail is delivered through Grace’s voice.
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