The film Titanic felt fundamentally broken to me. Here was a love story, not especially compelling but competent enough; now, crashing into it and holing it below the waterline, is a disaster in which hundreds will die, terrifyingly realised. The love story continues as nothing more than a distraction: too melodramatic to bring the loss of life closer, but not engaging enough to take centre stage.
Our Lady of the Nile is building to disaster, too—the disaster within the novel, and the greater disaster it prefigures. Against this, the everyday concerns of its schoolgirls could seem similarly unimportant. Instead, they underline the horror and the tragedy.