The first inkling that something was wrong was waking in darkness to find the cat pawing at my face.
Following a short prefatory account of a dream, this is the opening line of the story. The first line of Chapter One, at any rate. That first chapter is a doozy. It a perfectly constructed paranoid thriller-within-a-story of a woman waking up in the middle of the night to find something going on inside her home that shouldn’t be going on. And it sets the stage for the psychological condition of the protagonist. Since this is a novel written from a first-person perspective, that element is fundamental to the telling of the story and the telling of this story is really what makes it novel worth the read. Not that the mystery itself is unworthy, but like any good Hitchcockian thriller should be, the murder is merely a Maguffin for an exploration of the human psyche. Spoiler alert: no, the cat didn’t do it.
“For Christ’s sake, we’re on board a ship in the middle of the ocean—it’s about the safest place I could possibly be.”
Also like in any self-respecting Hitchcock movie, the story is partially an examination of how when push comes to shove most humans can always be relied upon to make the worst possible choices. Bad choices and unwise decisions populate Hitchcock’s thrillers more than birds populate The Birds and the narrator of this story is either suffering greatly at the near-debilitating effects of her psychological and neurological difficulties or she’s just plain not quite right. Anyone in the world who ever makes the statement that being a ship in the middle of the ocean is the safest place they could possibly be must immediately be considered psychologically suspect. Even those who have never heard of the Titanic disaster much less actually seen the cinematic disaster based upon the story should be expected to know that being confined to a finite space with odds of survival being 50/50 at best should a devastating incident occur at any given moment is far from the safest place to be. So why is she on a ship on the first place?
The Aurora. A boutique super-luxury cruise liner traveling around the Norwegian fjords, and somehow, I still wasn’t quite sure how, I had been lucky enough to snag one of the handful of press passes on its maiden voyage.
Thirty-two year old Laura Blacklock—who prefers to be addressed as “Lo”—is a British journalist. And she is on that ship on its maiden voyage (any why anyone would ever actually want to be a passenger on the maiden voyage of a cruise ship after 1912 is itself worthy of a deep psychological analysis) for a perfectly good reason: she’s not exactly a star journalist. Situated somewhere along the midway part of the masthead of Velocity magazine, Lo is looking for that piece that will improve her fortunes. So, despite suffering from sleep deprivation, burglary PTSD, generalized anxiety and specifically paranoid tendencies, the idea that being confined to a limited space in the middle of the ocean with no escape seems perfectly rational. And when all is said and done, who is to suggest that it was not?
“Hey guys, anyone else been following this Lorna Blacklock case? Looks like they've found a body.”
As the error in the name of our protagonist, the missing punctuation mark and the name of the speaker may indicate, one of the breaks from first-person narration that occur regularly if infrequently in the novel is the introduction of social media posts, along with newspaper articles and emails. The story taking place aboard the Aurora becomes itself a story being followed some not on the ship. The introduction of social media into the story is not merely a gimmick, but serves a purpose which further underscores the emotional state of the narrator and paints her tale with a thin patina of irony. Practically the entire rest of the world is capable of discussing what’s happening on the ship, but unreliable internet access aboard ship also serves to call into question her assertion of being in the safest place she could possibly be.
