Borodin, George Friendly Ocean.

Borodin’s short World War 2 novel is set aboard an ocean liner (the fictitious ATLANTIC PRINCE) making a solo eastbound dash across the North Atlantic during the early Fall of 1940. He focuses almost entirely on the comings and goings of passengers in the liner’s deserted 1st Class (only 50 1st Class passengers have booked passage from New York to England, though there are 200+ passengers in 2nd Class – a fact the reader learns only late in the novel) à la Grand Hotel. Characters – none too sympathetically portrayed – include an aging Russian countess and her elderly husband, a Romanian diplomat, a newlywed couple, the ship’s philandering doctor and his spouse, a floozy from New York City by way of Buenos Aires, a young mother (a “Mrs. Borodin,” clearly one of the author’s inside jokes) and her baby and an English army colonel returning to Britain after a secret conference in the States. Also onboard is a Nazi saboteur who, though unsuccessful in blowing up the ship at her dock in New York, does succeed in getting the vessel torpedoed by a U-boat in mid-Atlantic. Despite the dramatic possibilities of his story Borodin’s prose is curiously unengaging and flat, and it is only when the ATLANTIC PRINCE’s survivors take to the lifeboats that the story really picks up.