Jonathan Raban (1942–2023)

In the late '80s, Margaret Thatcher was beset by "turbulent priests" who would insist that Christian values included Charity, which meant looking after the disadvantaged, you know, like what Jesus did. Maggie wasn't having any of it! So, she took herself off to deepest Scotland, at the time a nation utterly opposed to her government, to address the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, a message delivered there, but intended for the Archbishops 'back home'. Presuming to give a lesson show more in theology to her reverend audience, she told them in no uncertain terms that the Church has no business dabbling in 'society', which in any case doesn't really exist, that she had found a loophole in Christ's injunction to love others as you love yourself, and that the business of the clergy was with the souls of the dead, not the conditions of the living. It didn't play well to the Scots, but went down a storm in the Tory heartlands, most of whom would identify as followers of Jesus Christ, the humble man who fed the hungry and cared for the sick. Turning from this contemporary dissection of her speech to today, I can only wonder at the sight of so many professed people of faith who support leaders embodying the exact antithesis of the moral creed upon which they claim to build their lives and their salvation. show less

But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before.

It's obviously no coincidence that Raban gives the young woman he lives with for a few weeks in St Louis the name "Sally" - this is first and foremost a book about the author's long fascination with Huckleberry Finn and its narrator's ability to slip away from sivilising influences in the nick of time. Raban might be show more disappointed by the detail of the 1979 America he finds in his journey down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to the Louisiana swamps, but he never loses his fascination for the scale of the country and the possbilities for lighting out that it offers.

The river itself is a major character throughout the book - it's striking how much, here as in his other travel books, Raban has to say about water. There are paragraphs and paragraphs of description of how the water looks and sounds, and how it moves under different conditions. Eddies, swirls, risers, chutes, confluences, washes, waves, reflections, bubbles - you name it, he finds something to say about it. Oddly enough, most authors of books on rivers and the sea only tend to make rather fleeting references to the element they are travelling on, but in Raban it is always present. Even when he's on land and merely catches a glimpse of the river in the distance, he takes the trouble to tell us something about what the water is doing.

When he's not writing about the water, he also has some pretty interesting things to say about the towns and cities he stops in, and the people he meets there. Speech and its quirks apparently matter a lot - he takes a lot of trouble capturing the eccentricities in the way people talk to him and using them to make his characters come alive. This sometimes comes over as a little bit too Mark-Twainish, but he's usually careful to avoid sounding like a patronising Englishman making fun of simple Americans (except when he catches himself acting just like the patronising Englishman and indulges in a bit of self-mockery). He perhaps isn't quite sufficiently aware of how much he succumbs to the Huck Finn temptation to search out the oddest characters in every place he visits, but as this is one of the most entertaining aspects of the book, we needn't complain about that too much.

There's a lot of America going on in the margins of the story - it's the autumn of 1979 and many of those he talks to are busy with the Iran hostage crisis and the run-up to the Reagan-Carter election. The apparently irreversible decline of the inner city, the parallel loss of the economic relevance of riverside small towns, and the growth of fake history tarted up for the benefit of short-term tourists are all recurrent topics. There's a nice irony in his finding the most vapid example of the last of these in Hannibal, where a local businessman points out to him that the whole tacky Mark Twain souvenir business is irrelevant to the economy of the town, which really depends on a massive grain-processing plant. In Memphis, he spends some time with the campaign team of a black mayoral candidate (Judge Otis Higgs), trying to make sense of relations between races in the modern South. Needless to say, he doesn't find any easy answers to that question, but what he does have to say sounds sensible. show less

I was really liking this book up to about the last 10 pages. Although the dust jacket reviews talk only about the post-9/11 world in which it is set, to me, all that was only a back drop. People cope as Homeland Security, local police, the FBI and who knows who else become more and more visible. If its security checks to get on a ferry (which I've experienced) or Homeland Security home movies to frighten the wits out of every one, you eventually cope. I felt that the story was more about the show more characters. Frustrated free-lance author Lucy who finally gets a plum assignment but can't really believe that the author she is to write about, August Venags is real. Lucy's friend and neighbor the actor Tad whose left-wing fantasies seem to be getting the better of him. Lucy's 11-year old daughter Alida (the best character) who copes with 6th grade, her mother's attitudes and algebra homework by trying to add it all up. August Venags the professor who hits it big with his memoir of Nazi prison camps as a child. I really liked the development of all the characters.

But as I neared the end of the book I started to get concerned about how the author was going to end the story. I read a lot of science fiction and I've gotten good at predicting when a novel is the first part of a new series. Generally the plot has too many loose ends. Will Lucy finish (or even start) the article? Will Tad go crazy? Will Finn get arrested? Will Mr. Lee tear down the apartment building? And on and on.

One other reviewer thought the book was setting up for a sequel. My problem with a sequel was that this didn't seem like a story that needed a sequel to finish. And certainly not every loose end needs to be tied up. But the author chose an ending so jarring and so from-out-of-nowhere that he might just as well as have had Martians attack or the sun go nova.

I felt cheated. And there won't be a sequel. The ending made all the questions and loose ends irrelevant. show less

Having travelled down the length of the Mississippi in a small boat and come to love the country, Raban wanted to get the full experience of what it used to be like to be an immigrant to this vast country. His partner drops him off at the docks in Liverpool and he climbs aboard a container ship called the Atlantic Conveyor, that is ready to depart for New York. A tropical storm, called Helene, delays the voyage and makes for a rough crossing. It does give him time to think about those who show more were making this voyage with no intention of returning back to the UK. They pause briefly in Halifax to unload some cargo before heading onto New York.

He has secured the use of an apartment, on East 18th Street, between Union Square and Gramercy Park in New York. The concrete cell as he calls it, is half the size of the room he had aboard ship. Naturally, he checks out her bookshelves, before heading out onto the streets to walk where other immigrants first made the tentative steps in making this country their home. The grey cliffs of Manhattan are visible from the apartment and there is a constant low-level rumble of traffic the ebbs and flows throughout the day but never ceases. As he moves around the city, he begins to see that life there can be seen through the prism of the department store, Macy’s in particular. It offered a way of life for some people and a glimpse of something unobtainable for the rest. Taking time to sit on a fire hydrant and observer life as it rushed around him, he began to see that the New York was stratified into two layers; the Street People who are those who are just keeping their heads above water, and the Air people who were whisked to places by lifts, taking them far away from the street.

Having had his fill of this city it was time to hit the road. Taking the I78 and then joining the much larger I80 he headed south, flying past the drivers pootling along at 50. Arriving in Guntersville, Alabama he finds it very much different from New York. Staying in a rented cabin he sets about meeting the residents and has to borrow a dog for personal security by the lake. Realising that this community has very conservative views he keeps a lot of his opinions to himself, knowing that some will take offence to them. It was time to move on again.

This time he was travelling by plane across the country. Not his favourite form of transport, especially when the plane was stuck on the tarmac and not going anywhere any time soon. The contrast with his nerves and a guy nearby who has a basket of popcorn and a book and pays no attention to the announcements. It gives him time to consider the differences between the American’s ease in which they take a plane and the event that flying in Europe is at that time. His destination is to the city where the plane was made, Seattle. It was here that he began to realise that he wanted a city he could mould to his shape, rather than having to fit in with what others did. First, though, he had to find somewhere to live, provided his car he was driving could make it. It was a place that felt American, and yet didn’t fit the other characterises that he came to know for other travels around this country.

It wouldn’t be a Raban book without some sort of boat journey and he heads to the diagonally opposite side of the country on the southern tip of Florida. While he is there he contemplates some of the, shall we say, less legal ways of making money in the region. Talking to the law enforcement people there about it he realises that it is fraught with danger and he would be in the high risk of something nasty happening to him. Chartering the Sea Mist he settles into a gentle cruise off the coast and is even brave enough to put of shorts and reveal his lily-white legs to the sun and probably consternation of the locals…

He writes about America so well, treating the flaws of the people with a warm shrug and embracing the qualities of the places he visits. I am glad too, that I read them in the order of publication, you sense as you travel with his through all his books the warmth that he has, as he meets people and places and experiences the richness of humanity in all its facets. You also sense in this book, his desire to settle somewhere that suits him and it turns out that Seattle was the place that he moved too and where he still lives now. I think that this is my favourite book of his so far of the five that I have read. Highly recommended. show less