Travel Blog

Jonathan Raban, who died Tuesday at the age of 80, was one of the people most responsible for travel writing’s late 20^th century renaissance. Like Paul Theroux, who pretty much started the genre’s resurgence with The Great Railway Bazaar in 1975, he didn’t retreat from the scene, letting the locals and their environs speak for themselves; he became the main character in nonfictional picaresques. He took Evelyn Waugh’s first-person junkets to a higher, more plot-driven level. In Old Glory, published in 1981, he sailed the length of the Mississippi River, capturing memorable people and moments but also telling of his personal journey – an adult, solitary, immigrant Huck Finn whose downriver progress was momentarily halted by an affair in St. Louis. Like Theroux, he infused and enriched the travel book with elements from the novel, not the least of which were narrative arc and engaging protagonist. Readers could eagerly follow the tale of the author’s passage while, almost subliminally, learning about the lands he passed through,

Unlike Theroux, the Englishman Raban brought a foreign eye to familiar places, which was also a feature of some of the new travel writing. In a world that was increasingly being visited by tourists, he went where the tourists lived – in Old Glory, the small towns and prosaic cities along the Mississippi. In a subsequent book, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, he tried to recreate the immigrant experience, settling down in various places – Manhattan, Guntersville, Ala., the Florida Keys, Seattle – to study the cultures. And, with his sharp eye, wry humor, and well-stocked mind, he made his readers see them afresh. Driving through a city’s business district he noted the “plastic Alpine chalets of McDonald’s and Arby’s.” On a similar stretch in a later book, rather than repeat himself, he wrote about the “fast-food pagodas.”

But his analytical skills – aided by a formidable knowledge of history and culture, geography and religion – are what made his travel writing important. A piece he wrote for Granta magazine, on the Mississippi floods, began with this head-scratching sentence: “Flying to Minneapolis from the West, you see it as a theological problem.” He went on to describe the flat, orderly farms of Minnesota, “laid out in a ruled grid, as empty of surprises as a sheet of graph paper,” and then the river, that “sprawls unconformably across the checkerboard… Like John Calvin’s infamous bad temper, it presents itself as the wild beast in the heart of the heartland.” Interpreting a landscape, wresting out its meanings as opposed to simply describing its features, was another aspect of the new travel writing, and Raban did it with unparalleled brilliance and flair.  

(Tomorrow I’ll write about my two meetings with the great writer.)