Your life depends on it

Thomas Jones

• Surveillance by Jonathan Raban
  Picador, 327 pp, £16.99, September 2006, ISBN 0 330 41338 4

Jonathan Raban’s first work of fiction, Foreign Land, was published in 1985; his second, Waxwings, in 2003; Surveillance is his third. A gap of almost twenty years, and then two novels in fairly rapid succession. In the meantime, he has written a number of works of non-fiction: of memoir, reportage and – for want of a better way of putting it – travel writing. It may be tempting to see some significance in his recent turn to fiction, but perhaps this is to underestimate the porousness of the membranes between different kinds of writing. ‘By the time you’re writing memoir,’ Raban said in a recent interview, ‘you’re effectively writing fiction, because you’re concerned with all those fictional things – with the story, with making the character sound convincing.’