Jonathan Raban

Jonathan Raban was the author of many books, of fiction, criticism, memoir, reporting and travel writing. He died on 17 January 2023. Father and Son, some of which first appeared as pieces in the LRB, will be published in the autumn.

Planes, Trains and SUVs: James Meek

Jonathan Raban, 7 February 2008

James Meek’s last, bestselling novel, The People’s Act of Love, published in 2005 to great critical acclaim, was set in 1919, in ‘that part of Siberia lying between Omsk and Krasnoyarsk’. Anglophone readers who can locate ‘that’ part of Siberia without a good atlas deserve spot prizes. The historical date and exotic location gave Meek a fictional and cultural space in which extraordinary events and people could seem believable, when placed inside a landscape rendered in exact and first-hand detail. Things are possible between Omsk and Krasnoyarsk in 1919 (as they used to be in first-century Palestine) that would raise eyebrows were they reported now in, say, Camden Town or Virginia. It’s a tribute to Meek’s skill as both a realist and a determined unrealist that he could seemingly invent a strange Christian sect of self-mutilated castrates and a cannibal who takes along a green companion on his journey lest he run short of food along the way, and then reveal in an afterword that such practices were well documented in the Russia of the time – which is rather like finding a footnote to One Hundred Years of Solitude directing one to a peer-reviewed article about inexplicable ascensions by means of bedsheets in Colombian villages.

Letter

Beastly to Canute

23 July 1987

SIR: Something should be done to rehabilitate the reputation of King Canute. Perhaps a ‘hands off Canute’ movement. He was a very intelligent, able and successful king, but the only purpose for which he is mentioned now is to illustrate the sort of ignorant obtuseness, joined with vanity, which he was seeking to combat on that famous tidal occasion. Presumably his courtiers got the message, but...

Martian Arts

Jonathan Raban, 23 July 1987

In 1972 the final issue of Ian Hamilton’s Review was given over to a symposium on ‘The State of Poetry’. Only fifteen years on, it has the flavour of a yellowed historical document. The symposium’s tone is embattled: it finds enemies and traitors on every bookshelf, with the whole future of English poetry threatened by sinister forces. ‘American Poetry’ is seen as the big, bad colonial influence by more than half the 35 contributors, few of whom bother to make it clear whether they mean Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsberg, or the Black Mountain imitators of William Carlos Williams. ‘The Liverpool Poets’ are regarded with a mixture of fear and derision. ‘The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy Fuller. ‘Infantile simplicity is all,’ wrote Julian Symons.

Letter

Eliot at Smokefall

24 January 1985

SIR: Barbara Everett is being a shade disingenuous when she attributes her phrase ‘behind Harrods’ to Eliot’s ‘behind the pig-sty’ (Letters, 21 March). She also seems to have a rum command of London’s social geography. In Angus Wilson’s short story, ‘More Friend than Lodger’, a Belgravia hostess explains exactly where ‘behind Harrods’ is between Knightsbridge, Pont Street and...

Your life depends on it: Jonathan Raban

Thomas Jones, 19 October 2006

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...

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When the hero of Jonathan Raban’s new novel is scolded for living in a world of his ‘own construction’, the implied rebuke falls flat: this, for Raban, is the whole point of...

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Funny Water: Raban at Sea

Frank Kermode, 20 January 2000

Jonathan Raban is afraid of the sea, saying it is not his element, which is probably why he spends so much time on it. He does not claim to be a world-class sailor, though he is obviously a...

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When Dad Came Out Here

Stephen Fender, 12 December 1996

‘I am not a travel writer,’ Jonathan Raban said in a recent interview. ‘For me, “travel writer” means someone who samples other people’s holidays – you...

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Some More Sea

Patrick O’Brian, 10 September 1992

The last few years​ have been rich in Oxford Books, and I have read three of them: 18th-Century Verse and 18th-Century Women Poets, both edited with great skill and...

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Thank God for John Rayburn

Mark Ford, 24 January 1991

‘Travelling,’ Jonathan Raban once remarked, ‘is inherently a plotless, disordered, chaotic affair, where writing insists on connection, order, plot, signification.’ Even...

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Tracts for the Times

Karl Miller, 17 August 1989

There can’t be all that many people who are willing, in the presence of others, to call themselves intellectuals. There may even be those for whom intellectuals are a fiction, like fairies....

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Out of the jiffybag

Frank Kermode, 12 November 1987

Here begins a review of two books which are largely collections of reviews, and some readers, reviewing it, are sure to ask whether this flea-on-flea process is desirable or even tolerable. My...

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Gentlemen Travellers

Denis Donoghue, 18 December 1986

‘I am assuming,’ Paul Fussell said in Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980), ‘that travel is now impossible and that tourism is all we have left.’ To...

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Costa del Pym

Nicholas Spice, 4 July 1985

In a letter to Robert Liddell dated 12 January 1940, Barbara Pym speaks well of her progress on a new novel, Crampton Hodnet, which she finished later that year, but which has only now surfaced...

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Gentlemen Travellers

D.A.N. Jones, 15 September 1983

The cool, courteous Alexander Kinglake and the hot, contentious George Borrow are two of the best-liked and most influential travel writers of the 19th century. They were contemporaries for much...

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An American Romance

Edward Mendelson, 18 February 1982

Old Glory – the book written by Jonathan Raban – is an altogether different book from the Old Glory that was praised in the reviews, but it is no less wonderful for that. The book the...

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