Coasting (book) - Criticism

Criticism

The book is remarkable for its penetrating and highly perceptive insights into the character and state of the British nation at the time of writing. One also has to greatly admire him for taking on the challenge of a single-handed voyage around the British Isles, a feat that requires great personal courage on the part of the sailor. For most of the book, Raban, rather like Joyce, is able to form an objectively detached view of his country whilst out at sea on board his boat. However, rather than taking the battering ram approach of his eccentric predecessors (men like Middleton, McMullen, and Hilaire Belloc), he uses beautifully crafted language to describe the life of a single-handed sailor in great awe of the sea, with detailed almost lyrical descriptions of the characters he encounters along the way. Two passages that particularly stand out are of Raban's rather hostile meeting with Paul Theroux at Brighton Marina, himself in the midst of researching a similar book about Britain, and a much friendlier one with Philip Larkin at Hull, a city Raban knows well from his student days while working as a part-time minicab driver.

Probably one of the best descriptions in the book is of the author's life as a child growing up in assorted Church of England vicarages,in a kind of social no-man's land, unable to mix with the council estate children opposite because they are socially inferior but also out of place in upper class society since a vicar's stipend was about £700 a year, equal to that of a skilled labourer living on a council estate. Raban sums his family's situation up in his own clinically detached manner: 'We belonged nowhere, We had the money of one lot, the voices of another - and we had an unearthly goodliness which removed us from the social map altogether.'

This is a writer at the very heights of his craft. Having become disillusioned with so much low-grade modern writing, it is a delight to come across an author who is on a par with some of the great writers of the past. Whereas Hunting Mister Heartbreak and Passage to Juneau are similar in theme but more localized in their American context, Coasting is a finer work because it so successfully reflects and intertwines Raban's perspective on his own life with that of the British nation. It also embodies the melancholic and personal themes of turmoil and loss that re-occur in Passage to Juneau.