Early in the HBO television series Succession, the grasping parvenu Tom leaves a meeting with a retiring colleague ashen-faced and terrified. He’s been discussing cruise ships, and he’s warned against enquiring too deeply about what happens on board. Such spaces, self-contained and far from the legal and social certainties of dry land, are mired in obscurity. They are best left conveniently forgotten.
Ravi Ahuja’s new book argues otherwise. Taking as its frame the little-remembered SS Egypt disaster of 1922, in which 87 were killed off the coast of Brittany, Ahuja proceeds to ask profound questions about class, race and work on the high seas.
