A Ship is Dying

Three minutes before the collision, the second mate caught a glimpse of a foam-shrouded shape lurking half a mile ahead. Fourteen minutes afterwards, the ship plunged beneath the icy waters of the North Sea. Into this brief space of time is packed a lifetime of turbulence and tragedy: moments of pathos, moments of boredom and of exultation. Heroes, cowards, suicides, plain fools, and a possible murderer emerge from rather ordinary men. Some emerge only long enough to drown, be crushed, skewered, smashed, sliced, and even cooked to death; and some get away. With great skill, authority and imagination, Brian Callison portrays these seventeen minutes of catastrophe so vividly that the reader lives through every instant as the ship is torn to pieces. Most poignant, perhaps, is the way he describes the ship itself -- an object capable of screaming, bleeding, heaving, and lying exhausted . . . before finally dying.