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Waxwings (Hardcover)

by Jonathan Raban (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Picador (15 Aug 2003)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0330413201
  • ISBN-13: 978-0330413206
  • Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 15.2 x 3.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 812,190 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Amazon.com

Jonathan Raban's Waxwings is a canticle for the late 1990s told through the intertwined lives of several Seattlites. In the novel, the city becomes a microcosm of America at the turn of the millennium, and Raban's characters--all in some way tragic "tourists" in the world--are rendered with a compassion that redeems their personal failings.

Thomas Janeway is a British novelist and professor of literature at the University of Washington whose life is coming apart in his adopted home. He deeply loves his four-year-old son, Finn, but his wife, Beth, is caught up in the dot-com explosion, and the couple has grown apart. As Seattle erupts in the WTO riots and terrorist plots, Janeway's life crumbles around him. His wife leaves him, his house becomes a shambles of half-completed reconstruction and his son is caught fighting in school. When he becomes a "person of interest" in the abduction and possible murder of a local girl, he is put on leave with pay from the university. Yet, Raban does not let Janeway--or any of his characters--wallow in self-pity. They all try to move forward with life, and even Janeway "the suspect" finds sympathetic allies in surprising places.

At one point in the novel, Janeway lectures his students on the "generosity" of VS Pritchett, saying that the writer believed "in a general redistribution of verbal wealth, in taking good lines from the haves, and giving them to the have-nots". This "liberal realism" also characterises Raban's work. Raban treats all of his characters, from Janeway to Finn, with patience and balance. He fully inhabits each and tells fragments of the story from the perspective of Beth, Tom, Finn and even Tom's illegal-immigrant contractor, Chick. One narrative infuses another, lending the novel a Dickensian universality. Together the disparate voices perfectly capture the particulars of a place, Seattle, at a unique moment in American history. --Patrick O'Kelley --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.



Review

The author of Bad Land and other impressive novels has come up with an exciting new one which promises to be the first of a series of three books set in the Pacific North-West. The two main protagonists are Tom Janeway, a Hungarian-born Englishman living in Seattle with his wife Beth and son Finn, and an illegal alien known as Chick, who came over in a cargo container ship, and is desperate to pay the $37,000 he owes for his passage. Chick meets up with Tom, the distracted professor, who needs work done on his house, and soon things begin to go wrong for him. It is a brilliant story very well told.
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26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Luminous and enchanting, 31 Aug 2003
By A Customer
A new book by Jonathan Raban is enough of an event for me to order it pre-publication. This is a classic narrative novel with no fancy postmodern glitz, written in Raban's usual luminous, classic style -- as one critic said, he is incapable of writing a dull sentence. His characters are real, three-dimensional human beings who rise vividly from the page and keep you turning pages to find out what happens to them.

It's set in Seattle at the turn of the millennium, and tells the intertwined stories of two immigrants -- comfortably-off, Hungarian-English academic Tom Janeway, and illegal Chinese immigrant Chick. Their contrasting experiences give Raban the opportunity to leap from glitzy dot-coms and paper millionaires to slummy docklands and homeless people's encampments, showing his usual empathy with a wide range of people and environments. In some ways, it's reminiscent of David Lodge, but Raban's writing is more sensitive and his characters more rounded. The way he builds up relationships between his characters is utterly convincing, and at the end, without any drama, or anything really being resolved, you get a feeling that there is some kind of epiphany in both Tom and Chick's lives. And it isn't till the last page that you find out why it's called Waxwings! The last two paragraphs are simply beautiful.

It's not his best book, but I stayed up late to finish it. First of a series of three, so I look forward to the rest -- but knowing Raban's pace of writing I will have to be patient ...

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A lovely novel, 10 Oct 2006
By R. Hollier (Guildford, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Waxwings (Vintage) (Paperback)
I hadn't read anything by Raban before but I loved this book - a warm-spirited and enjoyable novel.

Set in Seattle in the dotcom boom of 1999-2000, the main character is Tom Janeaway, who is surrounded by a series of other mainly male supporting characters - Chick the Chinese immigrant, Detective Nagel, the opportunistic novelist David Scott-Rice, the lawyer Hamish McTurk, Tom's son Finn. There's also his partner, Beth.

As I start to write down the list of characters I realise that much of the pleasure of the book springs from Raban's ability to evoke a broad cast of characters - and to bring to life their fumbling attempts to connect, interact and (to coin a dotcom sort of phrase) transact. One peculiar gift Raban has is for describing people's smiles.

Much of the writing is vivid. There's a scene when, soon after separating from his partner, Tom decides to take up smoking again:

"There was nostalgic pleasure in disrobing the box of its cellophane wrapping and tweaking the foil covering aside to expose the triple-banked, cork-coloured muzzles of the cigarettes."

Highly recommended.
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