Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings: Amazon.co.uk: Jonathan Raban: Books

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

"Raban is searching and compassionate. . . . And he is at all times eloquent."
-- Richard Ford

Following the overland triumph of Bad Land--whose prizes included the National Book Critics Circle Award--Jonathan Raban goes to sea.

The Inside Passage from Puget Sound to Alaska is winding, turbulent, and deep--an ancient, thousand-mile-long sea route, rich in dangerous whirlpools, eddies, rips, and races. Here flourished the canoe culture of the Northwest Indians, with their fantastic painted masks and complex iconography and their stories of malign submarine gods and monsters. The unhappy British ship Discovery, captained by George Vancouver, came through these open reaches and narrow chasms in 1792. The early explorers were quickly followed by fur traders, settlers, missionaries, anthropologists, fishermen, and tourists, each with their own designs on this intricate and haunted sea.

When Jonathan Raban set out alone in his own boat to sail from his Seattle home to the Alaskan Panhandle, he wanted to decode the many riddles and meanings of the sea: in Indian art and mythology, in the journals of Vancouver and his officers and midshipmen, in poetry and painting, in the physics of waves and turbulence. His voyage began as an intellectual adventure, but he soon found himself in deeper, more ominously personal waters than he had planned.
In this seaborne epic, Raban brings the past spectacularly alive and renders the present in a prose of sustained brilliance and humor. Exhilarating, panoramic, full of ideas, natural history, and mordant social observation, his journey into the wild heart of North America turns into a profound exploration of the wilderness of the human heart.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

A Perfect Voyage 2 Sep 2000

By A Customer

Format: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.

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The Talented Mr Raban 8 Mar 2000

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.

The Talented Mr Raban 7 Mar 2000

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.