Waxwings (Hardcover)

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.

Jonathan Raban is probably best known for his travel writing, although he has also written fiction. This is the first in a proposed series of three novels set in the Pacific North West of America. Raban, a British citizen, has always been fascinated by the United States and the American Dream, or America as an ideology. In the book he uses his observational skills and wit to draw a compassionate and humorous portrait of America at the turn of the millennium. The two main characters in the novel are legal immigrant Tom Janeway, a Hungarian-born English intellectual, and illegal alien Chick, who came from China hidden in a container aboard a freighter. Tom has in sense always been an immigrant. His parents fled Hungary in 1956, when he was just a toddler, and he grew up with a feeling of being different in a bleak London suburb. His Hungarian surname, Szany, became Janeway, just as nameless Chick is first just a 'chink' then turns it into Chick, and later acquires a fake ID. And it is not just the names of our protagonists that are in a flux. People around them change identities, the city they are in, Seattle, is changing, and peoples fortunes are in a spin. While the enterprising Chick sees possibilities and use in what others label junk, and uses hard work and resourcefulness to draw himself up by the bootstraps, Tom lives in his head with his literary chums and ideas. He is so self-absorbed that he does not realize that his dot.com paper millionaire wife, Beth, is drifting away from him. Toms detachment from his surroundings soon lands him in serious trouble and the story becomes a tragic farce. Raban writes with sensitivity and intelligence, and creates a thoughtful but also an entertaining novel that is a joy to read. (Kirkus UK)