Coasting

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, 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 show more 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

A marvellous account of the author's journey in the Gosfield Maid, a small boat, around the coast of Britain. Setting sail in Spring 1982 the author almost literally runs into the Task Force heading down to the South Atlantic following the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands, and much of the book is set against the backdrop of the war. Raban makes much of The Sun's painfully jingoistic headlines while offering his own more sanguine reflections on the conflict.
He also gives a fascinating vignette of life in the Isle of Man in the early 1980s, which he surmises was almost indistinguishable from the early 1950s.
Later on he visits his parents who, after meandering through the country from one Anglican diocese to the next (Raban show more pere was a senior clergyman) have ended up living in the midst of Southampton's red light district.
There is also a very moving encounter with poet Philip Larkin (whom Raban had idolised during his stint as a student in Hull). Still, this book offers all the generous and sensitive insights that have come to be Raban's trademark, and I was very glad to revisit this book almost twenty-five years after I first read it.
Raban also meets fellow author Paul Theroux who was engaged in a journey around Britain's coast by foot, also with a view to writing a book based on his expedition (this would eventually come to light as the sclerotic "Kingdom by the Sea".)
The only drawback from my point of view was the predominance of the English south coast - I would have preferred to read more of his adventures in Scotland. show less

This slight book is a perfectly composed small boat narrative. Raban has written the ideal travelling book, where the travel is at once central and entirely peripheral to the story. He penetrates, in a very modest way, the English (and Manx) heart and soul, creeping up hidden inlets and bypassed ports. This is Thatcher's Britain, but neither Raban nor many that he meets on his way are prepared to surrender their sovereignty to the rule of economic (or any other kind of) rationalism. Raban takes his sailing seriously though, in an amateurish sort of way that will likely lure some down to the sea, as it seems Raban was himself lured by tales of small boats in times past. It is odd in a way that a story of the circumnavigation of the show more British Isles should include so little of Scotland, but that is a small quibble. What is delivered here is 'just right', a story that doesn't exceed it's reach. As if Raban has brought to bear the same caution as a writer as he learnt as a sailor, one man in a small boat reading the weather and the sea and understanding that our ambitions and self importance are circumscribed by forces much greater than us. Which is the essence of this book for me. It's not humility, or modesty, but simple humanity that makes this travel story work for me. And there is a delicious encounter between Raban and Theroux of course, and while Raban doesn't quite say it out loud, this meeting seems to perfectly capture the difference between those who travel and write, and those who travel in order to write and be famous for it. Highly recommended. show less

I don't know why Jonathan Raban is so poorly known in the UK. He writes exquisitely. This book is intensely intimate in the way it charts the relationship between the British, the Sea, Boats, Island mentalities, British HIstory and our own personal relationships. It is just a chap on a particularly beautiful old wooden yacht sailing round britain calling in at ports all around the island. However his description perfectly mirrors the tidal ebb and flow and personal character fo the sea itself and his portraits of towns and people are like holding up a mirror. At the same time he is charting his own family relationships as he sails away and around alone. Stunning writing.

What a sweet little book. In the beginning it was hard to work out when it was written. It comes across in that timeless middle class way of habit and tradition. But then it parts way and goes on its own journey.

He gets a boat and decides to sail around the British coastline. As details get filled in the Falkland Island war begins and so we get placed in time. The journey goes anti-clockwise around the coast and by the time he gets "Up North" the 1980's Miners Strike is in its final throes.

Those are the markers in time but they are not really that relevant, they help give context to how he is writing about things and what those things meant at that time.

The rest is really about his voyage and ongoing learning how to handle this boat and show more how to be at sea. If I read it right he was given a few cursory lessons then sailed away. He pulls into various harbours around the coast to shelter, stock up, refuel, and to take in the locale and its inhabitants.

A very gentle travelogue that could be poignant at times and refreshingly uncynical as well. His telling of his life as a student in Hull was surprising and entertaining and his meeting with Philip Larkin was an unexpected treat.

A book for winter reading on wet rainy windswept days when you don't have to be anywhere else. Enjoyable. show less

I was surprised by Coasting, but enjoyed it nonetheless. I was expecting a chronological depiction of a trip around Britain in a boat - perhaps influenced by my recent reading of One Summer's Grace by Libby Purves. Coasting isn't like this, one minute Jonathan Raban was on the Isle of Man, the next he was in Brighton.

However disjointed I found the structure, the prose in Coasting was superb, and the book as a whole extremely enjoyable. I'll definitely be looking out for other books by Jonathan Raban.

Following on from his journey down the great Mississippi, Jonathan Raban decided to explore his homeland from the see. He acquired a small boat and filled it with personal effects and a lot of books, some relevant to his research and some just for the pleasure of having them nearby. He set off in 1982 to see if we were still a nation that loved the sea.

His journey would be back through the pages of our history, a semi nostalgic look back at his own childhood and a contemporary take on the state of our nation under the rule of Thatcher in the early 1980’s and the effect that the outbreak of war with Argentina over the Falklands Islands would have on our outlook as a people. However, this was all a backdrop to the seascapes that he show more travels through, the looking cliffs, fast races and eddy’s, sandbanks and other much larger boats that would challenge him every day of the journey.

He has a slightly tense meeting with Paul Theroux in Brighton who is heading around the UK in the opposite direction and also in the process of writing his book, The Kingdom by the Sea. Raban joins the miners on the picket lines to see what real political action is like and takes the views from the locals on their opinions of the Falklands War. There is often a vast gulf between the rabid right-wing press and their attitude to the war and the indifference of the general populace.

I didn’t think this was quite as good as Old Glory, but I don’t think it is as easy for an author to understand their home country as sometimes it is for an outsider to do. That said, it was written just as the country had begun an enormous political change, was at war and in the middle of a enormous strike by the miners. This means that he could easily see the differences and splits that were very visible in society at large. There is something about Raban’s writing that is beguiling and very readable too, he is a stickler for the details that he drops into the narrative when meeting people like Philip Larkin or talking to the owners of trawlers in Lyme Regis but also has that ability to present you the seascape; you sense the rock of the boat and the wind on your cheek as you bob along with him, in sparse lyrical prose. show less