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Charlotte Rogan

18.11.11 | Alice O'Keeffe

How far would you go to save your own life? That's the burning question at the heart of Charlotte Rogan's début novel The Lifeboat (Virago, March). Set in 1914, 22-year-old Grace Winter has just survived three perilous weeks on the open sea in a lifeboat. Grace and her wealthy new husband were honeymooning on a luxurious Atlantic ocean liner when an explosion forced everyone to abandon ship. At the beginning of the novel Grace is about to go on trial for her life following the events of those three weeks in the lifeboat. Quite how she managed to survive on the overcrowded lifeboat, when so many of her fellow passengers did not, is revealed over the course of the novel.

"It's a psychological exploration of the will to survive," says Rogan, over the telephone from her home in Connecticut. As Grace narrates her story it becomes apparent her memory of events may be flawed, to say the least, and the truth of what actually happened remains hazy. There are tiny clues throughout The Lifeboat that things may not have been exactly as Grace chooses to remember, and this uncertainty is likely to provoke heated discussion within reading groups.

Readers will be the judge
Grace is certainly an unreliable narrator, but is she a manipulative and devious person coldly capable of shocking actions? Or does she just do what is necessary in order to survive? Or is she merely an innocent bystander? The reader will make up his or her own mind. "I don't think the author knows everything about their character," says Rogan. "That ‘not knowing' is an important way to draw the reader in to the [novel] so you don't want to be explicit about everything . . . there are blank spots in the character even for me."

Rogan was inspired to write about a shipwreck survivor on trial after reading about a couple of intriguing legal cases from the 1800s in an old criminal law textbook belonging to her attorney husband. In both cases the survivors of a shipwreck were tried for actions committed while on a lifeboat.

The harsh realities of survival at sea as the lifeboat passengers wait to be rescued are starkly described in the novel. Besides the physical adversity—subsisting on ever decreasing rations of food and water, the struggle to keep dry and avoid the worst ravages of the wind and the sun—the novel also addresses the mental challenges as the passengers form alliances, plot and betray one another. For any to live, some must die.

Rogan herself is familiar with life on the ocean, although not, one hopes, the extreme privations detailed in The Lifeboat. She describes herself as "growing up in a family of sailors" and has fond memories of spending every vacation on a boat as a child, which led to a "complete love" of the sea. "My parents instilled in me a respect for nature," she says, "the real wildlife and the real sea."

The Lifeboat is Rogan's first novel to reach publication, but she has been writing for more than 20 years. Raising triplets meant she had to find "little corners of time" in which to write, which also involved some in­genious subterfuge: "I would hire a babysitter and then I'd drive out my driveway and circle around and park in the alley at the back of my house," she explains. "My computer­ was in a room off my garage and I'd sneak in there. My kids never did figure out that I actually never went away! They'd wave very cheerfully to me as I drove off and then I'd work in this room until the sitter's allotted time was up."

This dedication meant Rogan finished several novels but she admits she "spent very little time trying to sell anything" and while she had some interest from agents, nothing quite worked out. She explains: "I had no idea how to make contacts. I'd have loved to have had an audience but I had no idea or interest in the mechanics of getting one."

Rogan wrote the first draft of what was to become The Lifeboat 10 years ago but then set it aside, coming back to it in 2009 when she sent it, and another finished manuscript, to agent David McCormick. He much preferred The Lifeboat, and rights have been sold in 14 territories to date with Little, Brown US imprint Reagan Arthur publishing in the US.

In the UK The Lifeboat is Virago's lead début for 2012 and Rogan will come over to promote on publication. The marketing and publicity campaign has already begun with a huge run of "deluxe proofs" sent to booksellers and the national press. A collaboration with The Reading Agency is planned, to promote The Lifeboat through reading groups.


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