- Paperback: 448 pages
- Publisher: Picador; 1st ed edition (1 Nov 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330346288
- ISBN-13: 978-0330346283
- Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 15.5 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 681,095 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau is a pure delight, even for the most dedicated landlubbers. On April Fool's Day 1993, Raban set sail in his 35-foot ketch from "virtual reality" Seattle to travel the 1,000 or so miles up the often turbulent and tricky Inside Passage to Alaska. Despite describing himself as "a timid, weedy, cerebral type, never more out of my element than when I'm at sea", he nevertheless "meant to go fishing for reflections and come back with a glittering haul." And glittering this is, for Raban writes with such vivid acuity and witty iconoclasm about charted and uncharted waters, actual, historical, anthropological, natural and personal--and much else besides. His constants as he threads his course through the fretwork of islands, narrows and passes are tracing Captain Vancouver's 1792 voyage in the Discovery; the Northwest Indians' tenacious relation to the sea that dominated their lives and was mirrored in their art; Edmund Burke's 1757 theory of the sublime (terror was the most necessary ingredient) and the consequent, ecstatic recording of the coastal landscape (not by Vancouver, who found it dull and gloomy, but by his snobbish young upper-class officers); Raban's father's death and its aftermath which interrupted his voyage; and, of course, the sea itself with its six basic movements: pitch, roll, yaw, heave, surge, and sway.
Every page offers rewarding observations and colourful commentary: on the death of the great fisheries, the new tourism, a rereading of Shelley and Marcus Aurelius, bird flight, the rigours of outpost life, and even indeed the origins of "nookie." All of this makes for an utterly engaging, generously questing, scholarly and richly pleasurable work. -- Ruth Petrie
Product Description
The Inside Passage to Alaska, with its outer fringes and entailments, is a very complicated sea-route. Parts of it are open ocean, parts of it no wider than a modest river, and it has been in continuous use for several thousand years. Its aboriginal past - still tantalisingly close to hand - puts the inside passaged on terms of close kinship with the ancient sea of the Phoenicians and the Greeks. This book is much more than a book about a sea voyage; it is about Jonathan Raban's journey home to his father who is dying; about his crumbling relationship with his wife and also about the historical journey of the maddening Vancouver in his search for the North West Passage.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Perfect Voyage,
By A Customer
This review is from: Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings (Paperback)
I hugely enjoyed this book. Raban's sparkling prose and his knowledge and affinity for the sea are awesome. The Northwest is very much Raban's territory, just as California was for Robert Louis Stevenson - another brilliant British-born writer. There are some fascinating similarities between these two intriguing men :both dazzle with wit, erudition, intelligence and curiosity. Raban's 'take' on the American way of life never fails to stimulate and enrich the reader's mind; and I look forward to his next book. For my money, Raban, Amis, McEwan and Rushdie are the most interesting writers around today.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Talented Mr Raban,
By A Customer
This review is from: Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings (Paperback)
Raban's latest book is an elegiac masterpiece of writing. He takes a tortuous journey up the dangerous 'Inside Passage',and turns this into a metaphor for his own place in the world. Anecdote,myth and bereavement are all addressed in these moving pages. In particular,the painful break-up of his marriage and the tender love he has for his daughter,are beautifully expressed. Vancouver's journey of 1792 is lyrically described.Yet another work of rare sensitivity by the very talented Mr Raban. For me,the book was marred by the spiteful preamble at the beginning,in which the china-blue-eyed 'lummox'was cruelly lampooned. Unnecessary,I felt. His affectionate,yet tense evocation of family life reminded me of the cool style of Greene,Angus Wilson and Ivy Compton-Burnett.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Talented Mr Raban,
By A Customer
This review is from: Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings (Paperback)
An enthralling,magisterial book. Raban is every bit at home in Alaska,at sea,or in the back garden of a semi in Market Harborough ! Truly a writer of vision and stature.
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