Since the headline-making implosion of the Titan submersible last month while diving down to the world's most famous shipwreck, I've been indulging my intermittent but ever-present fascination with all things Titanic, a fascination that's endured since childhood. As part of this, I raided my bookshelves for titles picked up over the years which I had never got around to reading, one of which was Frances Wilson's How to Survive the Titanic.

Essentially the story of the Titanic disaster and its aftermath through the lens of one of its most notorious players, J. Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the White Star Line who infamously stepped onto one of the stricken ship's lifeboats as thousands aboard awaited their horrifying deaths, How to Survive the Titanic, or The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay is an excellent book. For those with a Titanic itch to scratch, it satisfies immensely by approaching the well-covered subject from an angle often obscured. While never a straight biography of Ismay, Wilson's book delves into his youth, his conduct on the ship and during that fateful night, and – most interestingly – in how he processed the disaster in the years after.

It's a fascinating character study, even if Ismay himself remains frustratingly obtuse. Whereas criticism of the late Stockton Rush, CEO of OceanGate and pilot of the doomed Titan submersible, seems (on current information) to be a pretty cut-and-dry case of corporate hubris and negligence, Ismay's lot as history's villain – not least his cartoonish depiction in James Cameron's otherwise impressive 1997 blockbuster film Titanic – comes across in surprising shades of grey. Wilson delves into the sensationalist US inquiry, which brought Ismay – clearly suffering from what we would now call PTSD – and the Titanic crew in front of a Senate hearing before their clothes had even dried, and also into the more sober, almost anti-climactic British inquiry. Much of our enduring impression of Ismay as coward and villain is in no small part due to the hasty and self-aggrandising first draft of history composed by the Senator who chaired that initial American congressional circus.

Frances Wilson isn't putting Ismay on trial in her book; although she presents to us the information as she knows it, it isn't necessarily in an attempt to redeem or condemn him. On questions such as the famous incident of Ismay showing a passenger the ice warning from the Baltic that Captain Smith had given him, Wilson is circumspect and her impressions of this woven into and returned to throughout the narrative. (My own pet theory is that this event, considered a smoking gun by both the US and British inquiries, is in fact one of those rare occasions of smoke without fire. I suspect Ismay had previously been dismissive of Smith's worries about the dangers of an Atlantic crossing, and when Smith later received the Baltic's warning, he kept hold of it and handed it to Ismay as proof – a silent way for this deferential captain to win a minor professional dispute with his boss.)

Rather, Wilson seeks to understand Ismay, and this both works to the book's advantage and, for some readers, provides some unusual flaws. To its advantage, it means the book is judicious and lacking in sensationalism; we're encouraged to see Ismay the man – who among us, being completely honest, can say we would not step into that lifeboat? – rather than the Ismay in the dock. "He was an ordinary man caught in extraordinary circumstances," Wilson concludes, "who behaved in a way which only confirmed his ordinariness" (pg. 282). In a story of grand tragedy and potent metaphor, we've always struggled to accept that Ismay was neither hero nor villain: he was just a human being.

Where this approach may bring flaws in How to Survive the Titanic is when, in order to bring us Ismay the man, Wilson delves into a great number of literary tangents. Wilson devotes herself, almost to the point of exhaustion, to a comparison between Ismay's plight and the nautical stories of Joseph Conrad, not least that of Lord Jim. Her rationale for this is sound:

"Ismay is less sympathetic than Jim, just as an evening spent with Hamlet at a hotel bar would be less engaging than an evening spent watching him perform his indecision on the stage… The distance afforded by art adds depth of vision; art increases our capacity for sympathy… It is only when we place Ismay's crude, monotonous, absolutely unfinished narrative next to that of Lord Jim that his form begins to thicken… [he takes] on an essential extra layer." (pp276-7)

And it works. The literary insights do bring out facets of Ismay's character and his decisions. We do gain more sympathy for him – or rather, empathy, for he is not often a sympathetic character. The flaw in the book, for some, will be that Wilson over-eggs this. At a number of points, Wilson abandons her Ismay content entirely for some English-lit-degree discussion of Conrad's writing – sometimes for pages on end. Sometimes this relates back to the Ismay story, but on others it leads to irrelevant tangents like "for Conrad the modernist, meaning is always carved out of language but words are also 'the great foes of reality'" (pg. 181). On such occasions, Wilson is more often a literary critic than a popular historian, and the reader's interest begins to wane. And though Conrad dominates, he is not the only writer invited to intrude. Wilson peppers her prose with quotes from Dickens, Coleridge, Bram Stoker, John Galsworthy, and many more. An attempt to link Ismay's responses to the US inquiry to Lewis Carroll's use of the word 'unimportant' in Alice in Wonderland is laboured and perplexing (pp122-3), and at one point Wilson is so lost in her weeds that she contextualises Conrad, her literary reference point, by referring to another literary reference point (The Wind in the Willows on page 190). It is, at best, peculiar; at worst, it is a deal-breaker for some Titanic buffs who would otherwise be interested in this book.

But, to use a literary reference that Wilson might appreciate, all's well that ends well, and How to Survive the Titanic does fulfil its remit of grappling with the obtuse and contradictory J. Bruce Ismay. Wilson writes well, sometimes very well, and while some relevant points of the story remain under-explored (Ismay's alleged affair with the fashion reporter Edith Russell, for one, or the newspaperman William Randolph Hearst's dislike for Ismay, which perhaps accounts for some of the press hostility), the book does well to provide a comprehensive accounting of Ismay's ill-fated Titanic odyssey and penance without exhausting the reader (some odd literary digressions aside). The tragedy of the Titan submersible has reminded us of the fascination that this topic still holds for us, but Wilson's book reminds us that the story of the Titanic, which announced the chaos that was to characterise the rest of the 20th century, did not need this unfortunate 21st-century epilogue. Tales like those of Ismay have always, and will always, hold our interest tightly. ( )

This book looks at the life of Bruce Ismay, head of the White Star Line, owners of the Titanic. Ismay has long been deemed the primary culprit in the sinking of the great liner, with the loss of 1,500 lives in April 1912, and in particular regarded as a coward for having taken an empty seat in a lifeboat, while so many were not able to do so. The incident defined his life and he was broken in spirit thereafter ("J. Bruce Ismay died on the night of 14–15 April 1912, and died again in his bedroom twenty-five years later. He was mired in the moment of his jump; his life was defined by a decision he made in an instant."). This biography looks at his early life, including his domination by his father, founder of the White Star company, who never cared for him, and his growing up an introvert and a loner, and a highly sensitive individual who hated being over stimulated and loved a peaceful, ordered life. I feel some sympathy for him on these grounds, as I have some of these characteristics myself. Though he persistently denied bearing any responsibility, there is little doubt that he bore a heavy share of blame for the catastrophe, and he clearly felt this in his innermost soul and was eaten up with guilt for the rest of his life. At the same time, he was by no means solely guilty; there is always a tendency in such disasters to find a single individual or organisation to blame, but things are rarely that simple. Captain Smith was still in charge of the ship which was going too fast in an ice field, and failed to order lifeboat drills which might have saved more lives; White Star made inadequate safety measures, in particular and most famously having nowhere near enough lifeboats for all passengers and crew, while nevertheless meeting the inadequate regulatory requirements; and the Board of Trade and ultimately Parliament bore responsibility for not having passed more appropriate such requirements.

It is interesting to look at Ismay's background and at what made him tick, and to see him as the human being he was, who made a particular very human decision in a moment of extreme stress - and who are we to judge a human reaction in such extreme disastrous conditions? - but the book was too long and drawn out for my liking. In particular, a great deal was made of parallels between Ismay's experience and the life and works of Joseph Conrad, in particular his novel Lord Jim. This seemed to go on excessively and was too repetitive. Also repetitive was Ismay's correspondence with Marian Thayer, a sympathetic survivor who he considered was the only person who understood him. There were just too many digressions diverting this book from its central interesting, but somewhat overblown, thesis. ( )

Well researched and well organized story of the sinking of the Titanic. The White Star company which owned the ship had just been sold to JP Morgan - but continued to be managed by J. Bruce Ismay, whose father started the company. The junior Ismay was a contradictory fellow even before the building of the Titanic - perhaps not quite ready for prime time.

This is well worth reading for anyone interested in a fuller picture of that time and the events around this momentous event. ( )

I thought that this book was very interesting. I have always been fascinated with The Titanic. I was curious of how Ismay could live with himself after such an experience. I think it is a good read for a Titanic buff. ( )

Bit dry for my taste. ( )