The sub-title of [Polonaise] should read: 'Or the Wreck of the Titanic'. Like the Titanic, the greater part of this book is a magnificent piece of engineering, a product of intelligence, great technical skill and hard work. Also like the Titanic, when the journey has almost been completed, in fact as late as page 343, Read's finely constructed artefact, of which its creator has every reason to feel proud, hits an iceberg of such shattering banality that the reader is left at the end like the survivors of the Titanic after she had plunged from sight for ever: surrounded by nothing else but flotsam and jetsam, a very cold feeling at the bottom of the stomach and the unanswerable question: Why did it have to happen?

Now, in his previous book, Alive, Read wrote highly successfully of the Andes air crash of 1972 and in the novel which preceded that...