“Though not vain, I'm aware that my outward appearance raises expectations.” Thus 22-year-old Morgan, narrator of Beryl Bainbridge's novel: a gilded youth aspiring to significance, a romantic, hopeless with girls, a Wooster looking for a Jeeves. His uncle owns the shipping line shortly to launch the miracle of the age, the unsinkable Titanic.

On 8 August 1912 Morgan travels to Southampton to join his chums for the maiden voyage. Melchett and Van Hopper complain they wasted three hours waiting for him to turn up at the Café Royal. A baronet's daughter flirts with him. Wallis Ellery, “clever and absolutely unobtainable”, begins to obsess him. His range of acquaintances broadens to include Rosenfelder, a Liverpool tailor; a deserted chanteuse, Adele, intent on rebuilding her career in the States; the mysterious Scurra, dapper and well-informed; and a host of American and European types, from the aristocrats travelling incognito to a devoted old couple, Mr and Mrs Straus—whose role is reminiscent of Mr and Mrs Smiths' in Greene's The Comedians, a novel comparable to Bainbridge's in scope and tone.

Having assembled this varied and doomed cast, the author describes their inner journeys on the road to oblivion. The Titanic was afloat only five days before she struck the iceberg; within that tight dramatic framework the novel creates, then subverts Edwardian glamour. The coming war, as much as the immediate tragedy, is a brooding presence.

Right from the start, when a stranger dies in Morgan's arms on a London street, the omens are bad. A fire rages unchecked in the stokehold. The Titanic, pushed to beat her estimated arrival time in New York, is going too fast. Why does Scurra, before the catastrophe, insist that “it's every man for himself”?

Morgan is an engaging narrator, increasing in moral stature as the certainties of his life begin to crumble. His parentage has always been in doubt: at last, he learns the nightmarish truth. Scurra, who enlightens him, teaches him about self-interest, never more effectively than when making noisy love to Wallis within earshot of his aroused and anguished young rival. There are no nice gels, and no reliable father figures.

Bainbridge hits a tremendous pace as her story reaches its climax. In a remarkably concise book, shot through with laconic wit, she establishes complex characters who engage first the reader's curiosity, then affection. The elegiac theme extends far beyond the historical event. There are some choice farcical scenes in the swimming pool and on the dance floor. Then shots are heard as resolution dissolves into panic; the orchestra plays hymns on deck and “the water, first slithering, then tumbling”, reveals the identities of those who will survive.