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

Rather as he does in Coasting, Raban takes the conventional framework of the travel narrative and shakes it up to give structure to a complex, multifaceted meditation on the ways people engage with places and struggle to find sense in them. The result is more like a narrative poem than a prose travel book — ideas and trains of thought are linked by being juxtaposed and intermingled in the text, rather than by the author drawing explicit connections between them. The closest parallel I show more could think of to the effect is Derek Walcott's Omeros, but Raban manages to do it without the safety-net of poetic meter. Daring, elegant, and extremely rewarding for the reader, even if Raban's bleak mood is sometimes a bit hard to take. show less

Travel books often use the narrative logic of a journey as a framework for more discursive subject-matter: bits of history, autobiography, political commentary, "state of the nation" stuff. But however far they range away from the dotted line on the map, they are usually strict about coming back to it wherever they left it. Not so Raban: he structures his book around the ideas he wants to develop, using insights from his journey, taken in arbitrary order, to provide the support, show more illustration, or metaphor he needs. His map - significantly - has no dotted line on it.

His journey, in 1982, was a coasting voyage around Great Britain in a sailing boat. He started from Falmouth and went anticlockwise around, using the Caledonian Canal to cut out the tricky part round the North of Scotland. The first part of the trip up the Channel from Cornwall to the Thames is described fairly linearly, albeit in the middle part of the book; on the East coast we only hear about Hull and Blythe, in Scotland we get one brief vignette from Loch Linnhe, and on the West coast we get the Isle of Man and part of the passage across the Irish Sea towards Wales (in the opening section of the book). The rest is left to our imaginations. Most perversely of all, he finishes the book by telling us he is starting another journey, without giving us any clue where he is headed, or why.

What Raban really wants to do with the journey seems to be to dissect what being British (or at least English) means in the 1980s, how the British view themselves, their islands, and the rest of the world, and how he fits in with it, having grown up, the son of a clergyman, on the impoverished lower edge of the upper middle-class, the rather unsatisfactory product (in their view) of a minor public school. He uses the model of the Isle of Man to develop his ideas about insularity and how it makes us view the rest of the world, and ties this in with Mrs Thatcher's Little War, which conveniently breaks out as he is sailing towards the Plymouth naval base. Later on he also brings in an account of the miners' strike, which actually falls outside the timeframe of his journey, but is something you can't really omit from an account of Britain during the Thatcher time.

Where sailing books normally overwhelm us with technical information about the boat, equipment, weather and courses sailed, Raban makes a point of telling us more about the contents of his on-board library than about sails, masts and rigging. We gather that his boat is a wooden ketch designed like a North Sea fishing boat, but that's about as far as the technical description goes. He talks wittily and perceptively about some of his predecessors as writers about coastal sailing - people like John MacGregor, E.E. Middleton, and Hilaire Belloc, all clearly running away from lonely and unsatisfactory lives to try to find some sort of fulfilment in communion with the sea - and tries to analyse his own motives for buying a boat.

Raban was clearly irritated to discover that his "former friend" Paul Theroux was also busy with a trip around the island, in his case going clockwise on foot (see The kingdom by the sea). The two arranged to meet in Brighton: it's amusing to read their subtly-different accounts of what was evidently a slightly edgy afternoon for both of them, neither willing to give the other too many details of what he was working on (Raban had the advantage of writing his when Theroux's book was already published, of course). A happier (and equally comic) meeting is his reunion in Hull with the elderly poet Philip Larkin, whom Raban in his undergraduate days had apparently cajoled into acting as a kind of mentor.

Oddly enough, the other writer who is most obviously looking over Raban's shoulder is never explicitly mentioned, except for a throwaway remark about amateur theatricals: his fellow-pipe-smoker J.B. Priestley, whose English Journey (1934) dealt with many of the themes Raban picks up. Post-industrial society, the "merrying of England", depression in the North-East, inward-looking Englishness - all as actual in the eighties as they were in the thirties. Although Raban sails where Priestley travelled by bus, train and Rolls-Royce, there seem to be very strong echoes between the two of them, in the structure and feel of their books as well as in the subject-matter. Not that Raban tries to imitate Priestley's very oral "radio lecture/pulpit" style, of course: his voice is a more literary, abstract one, more in keeping with the 1980s and the printed page. show less