Hearts That Survive: A Novel of the Titanic

Who might enjoy North Carolina fiction writer Yvonne Lehman's newest Romance, 2012's HEARTS THAT SURVIVE: A NOVEL OF THE TITANIC? I can think of at least four kinds of readers. *** -- (1) People who are into historical novels based on well documented facts. Fact: the Royal Mail Ship (RMS) Titanic was nearly 900 feet long, was registered at over 46,000 tons and had nine decks. It was the world's largest ship then at sea. Crewman shoveled coal into 29 boilers, each three storeys high. Fifteen watertight bulkheads made the RMS Titanic theoretically unsinkable. On its maiden voyage from Portsmouth to New York, carrying mail and roughly 2,200 passengers and crew, shortly before midnight Sunday April 14, 1912, the Titanic scraped an iceberg and sank within hours. Roughly 1,500 souls perished and 700 survived. If all lifeboats had been filled to capacity (they were not) barely 53% of the people aboard could have possibly been saved. In fact, not quite 31% lived to tell the tale. The sinking of the unsinkable, ultra-modern, hyper-safe RMS Titanic was widely seen as a tragic rebuke to human hubris and modern man's reliance on technology. Some said that even God himself drowned with the Titanic. The drama fascinates to this day, for its passenger list (tycoon John Jacob Astor, Mrs Molly Brown -- "the unsinkable" -- et al.) and for the public investigation into what had gone wrong. Novelist Yvonne Lehman, however, adds an entirely new, futuristic dimension: what would the next fifty years have brought a handful of selected fictional survivors? *** -- (2) Readers who love a complicated plot that demands unraveling. In a fast-paced tempo worthy of James Fenimore Cooper at his best, novelist Yvonne Lehman's most graphic, memorable writing in HEARTS THAT SURVIVE describes the chaos, competence, cowardice and heroism during the few scant hours when the giant passenger steamer died and before its survivors were taken from their lifeboats. But even better than those gripping passages is the imaginative plot itself. Lehman invents a fictitious wedding witnessed by 300 first class passengers and crew aboard ship, not many minutes before iceberg collision. Groom John Ancell goes down with the RMS Titanic but not before completing a sonnet to his English bride, 21-year old Lydia Beaumont, and their unborn son Beau. That poem, along with a Scripture reference, John, an English toy train designer and poet, puts into a champagne bottle, corks the bottle and leaves it to the cold sea rushing in. Decades later that bottle will be found and its message reach both Lydia and their grown, now married son Beau, an internationally renowned film maker whose dream is to portray the sinking of the Titanic. For the first time Beau learns who his real father was. *** -- (3) People who like to be reminded that the Christian religion is a living, meaning-giving part of the lives of millions will be intrigued by the varying degrees of Protestant religiosity displayed by leading characters. Young lovers John Ancell and Lydia Beaumont lament their only weeks old, impulsive pre-marital sexual sin, repent, seek and receive Divine forgiveness and then happily rejoice in their coming (but not publicly declared) parenthood. Later a small church in Nova Scotia introduces friends of some characters for the first time to baptism by immersion. And the will of God is seen as a driving force in all of history, including surviving the sinking of the Titanic. Characters act out their religious convictions from time to time with entire naturalness and attractive spontaneity. *** -- (4) A fourth category of readers who will find much to admire in HEARTS THAT SURVIVE are students of psychology and motivation, particularly of what it is that makes women women. Young Rudyard Kipling's fictional Anglo-Indian Mrs Hauksbee was quite firm about women: "we know a great deal more of men than of our own sex." Mrs Yvonne Lehman proves Mrs Hauksbee wrong. She dissects female minds and hearts with the delicate skills of a surgeon. *** I think of Yvonne Lehman's 2012 HEARTS THAT SURVIVE: A NOVEL OF THE TITANIC as an experiment, an extremely bold and in large part successful one. Hitherto the author's best works have been long short stories or novellas. Now comes HEARTS THAT SURVIVE. And this true novel announces to the reading world that we can expect another quantum leap and then one more -- in length, complexity and analysis of emotions in any future fictional works of this popular Western North Carolina writer. Yvonne Lehman has now made herself a promising apprentice writer in the field of the historical novel along the lines created by Sir Walter Scott in WAVERLEY (1814). Unlike Lehman (who relies entirely on written reports) Scott was able to interview old men who had taken part in their boyhod and youth in the 1745 Scottish rising led by Bonnie Prince Charlie Stuart. Lehman has only read about the April 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic. She has not put boots on the ground in Nova Scotia. Her imagination has supplied all the rest of an often dazzling plot. *** Like almost everyone else in our small mountain town of Black Mountain, North Carolina, I know and like our local celebrity author Yvonne Lehman. I have watched her growth as a story teller for nearly 15 years. And grow she does. HEARTS THAT SURVIVE is not without weaknesses. Its Britons, Canadians and Americans tend to sound alike. Her careful efforts at limning British class differences fall short because she has not lived them. Her writing is more simple and folksy than her enormously imaginative and intricate plot might command. But on balance, this, Mrs Lehman's first true historical novel, augurs very, very well for others to come and that will, I trust, be closer to home (German detainees in North Carolina in World War One, for instance) that Yvonne Lehman is known to be considering. -OOO-