A Lesson from the Master

If Jonathan Raban doesn’t write the best English prose in the world today, I don’t know who does. Consider the following Raban sentence, from an introduction to Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi:

Like the river itself, the book is labyrinthine, a succession of meanders, chutes, and cutoffs; it turns digression into a structural principle, as Twain wanders downstream, then up, branching off at will into recollections, swoops of fancy, lectures, fictions, facts, guided tours, meditations, and sly parodies.

Raban’s sentence, too, is labyrinthine. Like a master riverboat pilot, however, Raban steers his way through the labyrinth without hitting a single snag, guiding the reader expertly from opening simile to concluding list.

Or consider this Raban sentence, from a newspaper piece called “Why Travel?”:

Nothing short of a terrorist hijacking is likely to deflect the modern traveler from his inexorable path as he jets from one major city to another, from Trust House Forte to Holiday Inn, with CNN talking him to sleep from one end of our shrunken-orange world to the other.

Like a modern traveler, the sentence jets its inexorable path from one noun to another, nearly talking us to sleep before opening our eyes with the striking image of a “shrunken-orange world.”

Or, if you prefer short sentences, try this one, from an account of Raban’s travels in the hinterlands of the Pacific Northwest:

“Coyotes,” Mr. Schmidt said, pronouncing the word as one might say crack-dealers.

From “Coyotes” to—wait for it—”crack-dealers,” the sentence bridges the gap between Mr. Schmidt and the London or New York reader, between nature and the city, between rural and urban predators.

These and many other masterful sentences may be found in Driving Home: An American Journey, a collection of forty occasional pieces written between 1990, the year Raban moved from London to Seattle, and 2010. Some of them first appeared in British publications like Granta and the Guardian, others in American newspapers and periodicals, such as The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. The pieces fall into several broad categories: profiles of Raban’s favorite authors (Twain, Robert Lowell, Philip Larkin); explorations of the Pacific Northwest (Raban’s strange new world); reviews of nautical literature (Raban is an avid sailor); reportage and commentary on British and American politics (Raban leans decidedly to the Left).

Driving Home is the sequel to Raban’s first collection of journalistic piece-work, For Love and Money, the fruit of two decades of labor in London’s Grub Street. The American edition of For Love and Money was published in 1989, the year Raban first visited Seattle. Since then, he has published half a dozen books, including a pair of slender novels set in Seattle (Waxwings, Surveillance). But his best books are those that draw on his own travels in America, including Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1991) and Passage to Juneau (1999), which blend observation, experience, history, and ecology into a hybrid genre he calls “human geography.” Many of the pieces collected in Driving Home reflect this same interest in the human landscape.

So what makes Raban’s prose so very readable? The answer, I think, lies in his transatlantic literary education and subsequent travels in America. Like other young, rebellious British writers who started out in the 1960s (Martin Amis, Ian McEwan), Raban looked across the Atlantic for inspiration, hungry for the next novel from Bellow, Updike, Roth, & Co. Indeed, Raban fancied himself a bit of an American from the beginning of his imaginative life, starting with his childhood reading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. From Twain and his successors, Raban picked up the idiom and rhythm of American English long before he set foot on American soil.

This is not to say that Raban’s reading made him an American writer, any more two decades of living in the United States have made him an American. As he explains in the introduction to Driving Home,

For an English-born reader, America is written in a language deceptively similar to one’s own and therefore full of pitfalls. The word nature, for example, means something different here, and so do community, class, friend, tradition, home …. The altered meanings and deep-water associations of American English, as it has parted company from its parent language for over four hundred years, reflect an experience of the world that has been every bit as different as that between, say, the Germans and the French.

What the American vernacular has done is to subject Raban’s Thames English to stylistic pressure, forcing him to weigh every word and to write clearly and directly for a transatlantic readership. Hence his cut-diamond sentences and crystalline prose.

Readers of Books & Culture may be particularly interested in Raban’s treatment of American religion. Raban himself—the son of an Anglican priest—has had no use for religion since the age of fourteen or so. Indeed, he nurtures a strong anti-clerical prejudice to this day, as expressed, for example, in an essay on Philip Larkin, England’s poet laureate:

At his memorial service in Westminster Abbey, I was surprised to hear a burbling dean posthumously enroll him—the poet of all our disbelief—into the ranks of the Anglican faithful. Larkin (who called religion “That vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die”) was, according to the cleric in the pulpit, if-not-in-fact, blah blah, a deeply human man, a deeply spiritual et cetera.

In his undiminished scorn for the Church of England and its “burbling” representatives, Raban reveals himself to be a very British writer of a certain age.

On the other hand, his métier as a writer requires him to take a dispassionate interest in American religious phenomena, including fundamentalist Christianity. In early 2010, for example, Raban joined Tea Party Nation and headed to Nashville in order to report on the movement’s first convention. There he met, among the other Tea Party faithful, a churchgoing woman who tours the country on behalf of Conservative Moms for America (“Wives, submit to your husbands”). While Raban leaves no doubt as to his own religious and political inclinations, he allows the woman to speak for herself, explaining why she loves Sarah Palin: “She’s not like a politician—she’s real.”

What drew Raban to this Tea Party activist in the first place was simply the fact that she is a smoker (and therefore a fellow sinner). But what makes her impossible to dismiss as just another “Tea Bagger” is the fact that she and her husband have adopted two little girls—”the light of their sixtyish lives,” in Raban’s words. Both girls, the woman informed him, suffer from severe developmental disabilities. When she pulled out her family photographs, Raban noticed something else: “She hadn’t bothered to mention that both girls were black.” Wisely, Raban ends his sketch of the woman on that note, letting her belief in the value of life—abled, disabled, white, black—sink in without comment.

Content-wise, the pieces collected in Driving Home will interest some readers more than others. Those intrigued by the Pacific Northwest will enjoy Raban’s various sketches and travelogues, designed to introduce the region to British and East Coast readers. Lovers of the sea will relish his portraits of solitary around-the-world sailors. Civil libertarians will resonate with his sharp criticism of the Bush Administration’s response to terrorism. Regardless of content, however, appreciative readers will linger over Raban’s limpid sentences, knowing that even pieces written for money betray the master’s hand.

Mark Walhout teaches English at Seattle Pacific University.