THE ICEBERG WINS AGAIN

By John Skow

A young man writes a virtuoso novel, and the reader, hearing this news, imagines what it might be: a blare of grand attitudes and romantic bosh perhaps, or a bravura display of cynicism not quite fully baked or fully earned. But the mood of Erik Fosnes Hansen's remarkable Psalm at Journey's End (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 371 pages; $24), published in its original Norwegian six years ago, when the author was 25, is dreamlike, elegiac stillness, a condition not usually thought of as youthful.

Hansen sets his tale aboard the Titanic in April 1912, when the great liner made its first and last voyage. On a starry night, aloft on a waveless ocean, the ship is seen steaming serenely toward New York City at 22 knots. In scene after scene Hansen describes an eerie quiet: the reader feels no sense of doom or foreboding. Wireless warnings of icebergs are received, without alarm.

Hansen's characters are the seven members of the ship's band (their names and histories taken from the author's imagination, not from the crew list). They are a diverse lot, talented and quirky flotsam from England, France, Ireland, Austria, Italy, Russia and perhaps Germany (though none, strangely, from Scandinavia). We get the life stories of several in brooding, inward, coming-of-age chapters. These are effective, though they show signs of emptying the author's notebooks of a lifetime of cherished oddities, including the story that in the 1730s, Russia's Czarina Anna Ivanovna caused an out-of-favor nobleman to sit on hens' eggs and cackle until the chicks hatched.

If Hansen means these drifting bandsmen and their stories to stand for Europe, as Europe saw itself in the relative calm of 1912, his intention is not insistent. But he did choose to put his musicians aboard the Titanic. So the band plays as the ocean liner sinks--not Nearer My God to Thee but Handel's Largo--and the stories end, leaving dead calm and chilling mystery. And a few shreds of nautical bandsman's lore, useless now that the old liners are gone. "Who could know beforehand," thinks the bandmaster early in the voyage, "that old ladies threw up at The Tales of Hoffmann if the winds were high?"

--By John Skow