Product Description

"Raban is searching and compassionate. . . . And he is at all times eloquent."
-- Richard Ford

Following the overland triumph of Bad Land--whose prizes included the National Book Critics Circle Award--Jonathan Raban goes to sea.

The Inside Passage from Puget Sound to Alaska is winding, turbulent, and deep--an ancient, thousand-mile-long sea route, rich in dangerous whirlpools, eddies, rips, and races. Here flourished the canoe culture of the Northwest Indians, with their fantastic painted masks and complex iconography and their stories of malign submarine gods and monsters. The unhappy British ship Discovery, captained by George Vancouver, came through these open reaches and narrow chasms in 1792. The early explorers were quickly followed by fur traders, settlers, missionaries, anthropologists, fishermen, and tourists, each with their own designs on this intricate and haunted sea.

When Jonathan Raban set out alone in his own boat to sail from his Seattle home to the Alaskan Panhandle, he wanted to decode the many riddles and meanings of the sea: in Indian art and mythology, in the journals of Vancouver and his officers and midshipmen, in poetry and painting, in the physics of waves and turbulence. His voyage began as an intellectual adventure, but he soon found himself in deeper, more ominously personal waters than he had planned.
In this seaborne epic, Raban brings the past spectacularly alive and renders the present in a prose of sustained brilliance and humor. Exhilarating, panoramic, full of ideas, natural history, and mordant social observation, his journey into the wild heart of North America turns into a profound exploration of the wilderness of the human heart.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #521492 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-12
• Released on: 1999-10-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 448 pages

From Amazon.com
British-born Jonathan Raban sets out on a passage from Seattle to Juneau in a small boat that is more a waterborne writing den, and as usual with the brilliant Raban, this journey becomes a vehicle for history and heart-stopping descriptions that will make readers want to hail him as one of the finest talents who's picked up a pen in the 20th century. The voyage through the Inside Passage from Washington's Puget Sound to Alaska churns up memories and stirs up hidden emotions and Raban dwells on many, including the death of his father and his own role of Daddy to his young daughter, Julia, left behind in Seattle. More than just a personal travelogue, however, Passage to Juneau deftly weaves in the stories of others before him--from Indians whom white men formerly greeted with baubles set afloat on logs, to Captain Vancouver, who risked mutiny on his ship when he banned visits with prostitutes, some of whom offered their services for bits of scrap metal. Pressed into every page are intimate descriptions of life at sea--the fog-shrouded coasts, the crackly radio that keeps him linked to the mainland, the salty marine air, and the fellow sailors who are likewise drawn by a life of tossing on water. While Raban successfully steers his boat to the desired port, readers ultimately discover that this insightful, talented sage is in fact emotionally in deep water and may not fully be captain of his own life. --Melissa Rossi

From Publishers Weekly
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. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Fans of Raban's chronicles of America's history (including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Bad Land) will find another side of the author in this introspective and quite personal new work. Long fascinated by the Inside Passage (the protected waterway that runs from Washington State up to Alaska), Raban casts off in his 35' ketch from his home port in Seattle to follow in the wake of generations of salmon fishermen. He draws a rather dark portrait of the region as he fills out its history, through the cranky journals of Captain Vancouver and others, and meditates on the beautiful but threatening and lonesome landscape, with its struggling communities, submerged mountains, tricky waters, and names like Deception Pass and Desolation Sound. When his trip gets interrupted by his father's death, and he finds himself increasingly cut off from his young daughter and wife (by a series of broken phones in economically depressed ports of call and by emotional distance), Raban's journey becomes an extremely personal one. Although the end result is a bit overlong, this is ultimately a fascinating and informative read. Recommended for public libraries.ARebecca Miller, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Passages
I initially picked up this book hoping for a sentimental journey in the area where I grew up. The inside passage holds a special mystique among Pacific Northwesterners and is generally accepted as the most scenic, challenging, and historic way of getting from Seattle to Alaska. But this book is much more than a travelogue. We get to join Raban on a much more personal journey.
Raban is obviously an experienced seaman, who sets out to explore the inside passage. As we accompany him, it becomes apparent this will be much more than a mere trip to Alaska. He intertwines history, beautiful scenery, and his own personal reflections into a fascinating trip of self discovery. Raban is a gifted writer who can draw you into the journey and the closer you get to Juneau, the more involved you've become. His descriptive prose takes you out of your lounge room and onto the boat with him. If you're looking for action-adventure, this is not it. But for a beautifully written book that parallels the stories of the sea with real life, this is a great read. Highly recommended.

blah blah blah
pedantic and self-serving, Raban blathers on and on in a way impressively formulaic and dull.

Book as Revenge
This is a great book for about the first third of its passage. I get the impression that like a musician with a few good tunes but not an entire CD worth of them, the idea of a cohesive theme is abandoned for the sake of size.
A book of the parallel trips of Mr.Raban and Cap'n Vancouver was enough for me had it been researched more deeply. I got the impression that he was bored with his own topic after firing off some initial brilliant ideas.
The hard right turn into the extensive description of the death of his father belonged in another book as did the wind up which feels essentially like he's using the merits of the rest of the book and his status as a writer as a weapon to dump on his wife and her decision to separate. If that's his way of dealing with the situation then it's not surprizing that the separation happened.
We all have these bizarre fragmentations in our lives; the public humiliation of his wife just makes me feel worse than when I started the book and I was left with the impression that I was [pulled] into a cheap shot.