Coasting (book)
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| Coasting | |
| Author | Jonathan Raban |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date | 1987 |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-671-45480-3 |
Coasting is a travel book by Jonathan Raban.[1] It is considered to be one of Raban's best books.[citation needed]
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
Written as a travelogue, Coasting describes his single-handed 3,000 mile voyage around Britain which he made in 1982 in an old restored 32-foot sea-going ketch. An important point is that Raban, as he himself points out, sailed with a chart and a hand-bearing compass "before GPS and fancy electronic systems"; he sailed by the look of the coastline. His story takes various digressions, just as his journey does, as he mulls over his childhood as the son of a vicar in the Church of England, and the current state of Britain under Margaret Thatcher during the time of the Falklands War.
Raban himself has commented on his own attitude to England and the influence of Thatcher at this time:
| “ | I grew up with a sentimentalised version of the English past, of the enshrined holiness of the squire in the grand house and the tenant farmer and the exact place you occupied. I got ticked off by my father in my early teens if I was seen wandering down the street with a girl from the local secondary modern whom I had met at a church hop. You know: "Not your class, old boy" ... I have to say, however, that it was easy to leave England in 1990. I hated England under Thatcher, although in a funny way I shouldn't have. I mean, she was as antagonistic to the old system of England as I was.[2] | ” |
The book is remarkable for its penetrating and highly perceptive insights into the character and state of the British nation at the time of writing. Raban, rather like Joyce, is able to form an objectively detached view of his country whilst out at sea on board the Gosfield Maid. However, rather than taking the battering ram approach of his eccentric predecessors (men like Middleton, McMullen, and Hilaire Belloc), he uses beautifully crafted language to describe the life of a single-handed sailor in great awe of the sea, with detailed almost lyrical descriptions of the characters he encounters along the way. Two passages that particularly stand out are of Raban's rather hostile meeting with Paul Theroux at Brighton Marina, himself in the midst of researching a similar book about Britain, and a much friendlier one with Philip Larkin at Hull, a city Raban knows well from his student days while working as a part-time minicab driver.
This is a writer at the very heights of his craft. Having become disillusioned with so much low-grade modern writing, it is a delight to come across an author who is on a par with some of the great writers of the past. Whereas Hunting Mister Heartbreak and Passage to Juneau are similar in theme but more localized in their American context, Coasting is a finer work because it so successfully reflects and intertwines Raban's perspective on his own life with that of the British nation. It also embodies the melancholic and personal themes of turmoil and loss that re-occur in Passage to Juneau.
[edit] References
- ^ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. "BOOKS OF THE TIMES", The New York Times, 1987-01-26. Retrieved on 2007-05-22.
- ^ James Campbell. "Northern Exposure", The Guardian, 2003-09-20. Retrieved on 2007-05-22.
