Passage to Juneau

September 4, 2000
Raban's purring English accent, playful imitations and knowing intonations perfectly nuance this pared-down version of his acclaimed tale of sailing alone from Seattle to Juneau. His journey through a sea punctuated by the "skittish humor of whirlpools" and colored by "fifty shades of grey" is nicely paralleled with the same journey taken by others before him, including Captain Vancouver's own dour explorations in the 1790s. Throughout, Raban is an inventive reader, creating many voices for the characters that people his tale; his nasal whine for the sickly, uptight Vancouver is hilarious. This playfulness gently contrasts to his more thoughtful, meditative passages, which encompass Raban's awe of the landscape and considerations of his own life and the small communities that cling to the rocky edges of the Inside Passage from Washington to Alaska. Vintage trade paperback released in October.

Starred review from October 4, 1999
As he recounts fishing a rain jacket he'd mistaken for a corpse out of cold Pacific waters, Raban wryly confesses that "gallivanting around the world in a small boat is a continuing education in one's limitless capacity for self-delusion." Sailing up the Inland Passage, the protected waterway that serves as a great nautical freeway between Puget Sound and Alaska, Raban (British expat and chronicler of the American experience) sounds its history in a clever, always curious, yet increasingly morose voice. It's a lengthy journey over vast territory, and Raban struggles to maintain a streamlined narrative. He finds himself at turns landlocked by fog, skimming across water that is incredibly deep, cold and oddly "greasy," intrigued by the "floating junkyard" brought by the tide and anchoring at once prosperous timber and fishing communities. In his NBCC Award-winning Bad Land, Raban composed a moving portrait of desert homesteaders in Montana and North Dakota from the intimate stories of several families. Here, although his journey is his narrative vehicle, the subject is definitely Raban himself, as explorer, traveler and man. He keeps the most intimate company with ghosts: his companions include the cruel Captain George Vancouver, who mapped the coast in the 1790s; the shipwrecked poet Shelley; the Indians and settlers who peopled the landscape. He also writes of his daughter and (increasingly estranged) wife, who remain back in Seattle, and of his father, whose illness and death in England interrupt and recast Raban's journey. A compelling meditation courses beneath the surface commotion of the book as Raban seeks solace (and himself) in the movement of the sea with its deadheads, whirlpools, unpredictable tides, submerged mountains and stony shores capped with evergreen wool. First serial to the New Yorker; 9-city author tour.