Jonathan Raban: “Stateless in Seattle”

Seattle Weekly last week published a feature story about—and interview with—writer Jonathan Raban. The focus is Raban’s new book, My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front, which writer Tim Appelo describes as “a kind of diary chronicling the shocks of our epoch: the [9/11] attacks, George W. Bush’s assault on American democracy, our traumatized attempt to fathom the Islamists’ motives and divine their next target, the weird mirroring of Islamofascists by U.S. neo-Puritans, the false dawn of Howard Dean, and Bush’s ugly second coming.”

An Englishman who resides in Seattle, Raban is the author of the celebrated travel memoir “Old Glory,” among other books.

Writes Appelo:

Pigeonholed by many as a travel writer after his reputation-making 1979 Arabia: A Journey Through the Labyrinth and 1981’s Old Glory, a quirky, snarky account of his trip down the Mississippi River, he is, in fact, far more esoteric than even the most literary of conventional travel writers, like Jan Morris (and far more reliable than the most esoteric, like slippery Bruce Chatwin). Raban proves that travel needn’t be a confining aesthetic ghetto: His fellow best-selling eccentric globe-trotter Bill Bryson intensely envies Raban’s ability to describe each new wave of the sea in language that’s precise, original, and poetically right, and the British author Adam Nicolson has called Raban’s 1999 Passage to Juneau “a kind of anti-Odyssey” wherein Penelope gives the hero the heave-ho—and adds that Homer is a travel writer, too. If anything connects Raban with the mainstream, it’s the way he fulfills W.H. Auden’s crack about the genre: “It’s in keeping with the best traditions/For Travel Books to wander from the point.” Raban does so gloriously, constantly changing tack, yet with a sailor’s unerring sense for the utterly idiosyncratic literary destination he has in mind.

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