Customer Reviews
So you think you know where you are headed? - By: M. J. Duggan, 29 Mar 2008 
This is a beautiful, & sombre story, told by one the finest writers of English prose. If you have no interestin travel writing, could not care less for fulsome travel brochure descriptions of scenery or city, find patronising anecdotes of quaint & quirky locals & their customs annoying then this is the type of travel writing that you may want to read.
Mr Raban sets off from Seattle with the intention of sailing his yatch single handed to Juneauin Alkaska by a route known as the Inside Passage. A serpentine journey round islands,and reefs. There are tricky, dangerous tidal races, half submerged logs,and sudden violent squalls to be avoided. It is a daunting journey for a middle aged man, who readily admits to being a timid, & nervous sailor. He is out of his depth, & he knows it. Hence the description of the actual sailing is one of constant watchfulness, & anxiety. Hazards real & fanciful keep himin a state of permanent neurosis, constantly looking for a sheltered anchorage where he can ride out the storm or calm his nerves.
Mr Raban has taken a keen interestin the history of the native Americans who live on the west coast of America, & his opinions of their culture & development are scholarly, & humane. He is amused by the contemporary view of the Indians as proto-enviromentalists at one with nature, when they patently were not. Also he has taken a keen interestin the activities of the first European explorers & settlers of the region & makes constant references to the voyage of Captain Vancouver along the same route as his ownin 1797.
But the real interest & drama lie notin the voyage or the history but with the author. As the voyage progresses Mr Raban emerges as the real story, not merely it's narrator. What we find is a man beset by worry & fretfulness, excited by his adventure but self reproachful for leaving his infant daughter & wife behind. The journey is brought to a jarring halt by the news of his father's illness, then death, & finally by a dreadful personal disaster that lands like a blow upon a bruise which sends him listing forlonly back to Seattle.
This is a story with a simple message, told against a seascape. You can chose your destination, plot your course, & steer as cautiously as you can, but it may do you no good. Unpredictable, & willful forces beset your voyage & you can never be sure where you will make landfall, or worse you may simply disappear beneath the foam.
Mr Raban writes simple,lucid & subtle storytelling at its very best. If you read this book I think you will come from it feeling as if you too have been on a long voyage, & returned to a place you thought you knew well, but are now less sure.
Wonderful account - By: R Morrell, 05 Jan 2008 of Jonathan's passage on his own boat between Seattle & Alaska. I love the way he interweaves his voyage with maritime history & his own personal reminisces. Sadly, he makes this trip at a time when his marriage is breaking up, & the accounts from this understated Englishman livingin Seattle are all the more poignant for that. I write about the process of saying 'goodbye' on the roadin my book Travelling Magically: How to Turn Your Journey into a Life-changing Experience & give a few tips on how to make an agonizing process easier.
A journey of the soul - By: Ivan Kinsman, 09 Apr 2007 Raban takes the reader along with him on his 35-foot sailboat - described as his 'narrative vehicle' - as he single-handedly traverses the entire 1,000 miles of the Inside Passage from Seattle, Washington, to Juneau, Alaska. On the voyage, Raban reflects on the history & character of the territory he is sailing through, the art of navigation & what the journey will ultimately mean for him as he describes the breakup of his marriagein the final two chapters. As Raban himself says:
"I knew from the beginning it was going to be a book about turbulence. I wanted to use that Indian sense of navigation of a boat as metaphor for the navigation of a soul through life. I then had granted to me two pieces of extreme turbulencein my own life which I could not have possibly predicted. I found plenty of turbulence to write about, the equivalent of two major hurricanes coming a month apart."
As the author makes his preperations for the voyagein the Fitting Out chapter, he mentions he is followingin the salmon gill-netters' route, 'not to fish ... but to lay some ghosts to rest & come to terms, somehow, with the peculiar attraction that draws people to put themselves afloat on the deep, dark, indifferent, cold, & frightening sea. .. For the term of a fishing season, I meant to meditate on the sea, at sea.' He is also followingin the footsteps of the short, rotund, balding, bug-eyed & highly temperamental Captain Vancouver whose ships, the Discovery & Chatham, sailed the Inside Passage on a surveying expedition of 1791-5, later describedin Captain Van's four-volumed account the Voyage.
As he sails along his route, Raban also devotes a large part of his story to the canoe-Indians & their relationship with the sea - the Kathlamet, Kwakiutl, Salishan, Bella Bella, & Tsimshian - interspersing his narrative with stories gleaned from Franz Boas' monumental collection of their tales. To a certain extent, the story is about the loss of their language, traditions & culture after the arrival of the white man, & the 'prettification' of the wild landscape for the benefit of the large cruise ship & their hordes of 'lice-like' passsengers who swarm over every port of call.
Interwoven into the travelogue are accounts of the two personal crises which grip Raban on his voyage. The first is the terminal illness of his father, Peter, describedin the Rites of Passage section. Raban returns to England, like a foreign visitor, for a rather uncomfortable reunion with his family and, above all, his father with whom it seems he has had a troubled relationship. He attempts to reach out to himin his illness but it is difficult for them both to bridge the emotional divide that seperates them. Raban gives his reader a highly personal - although at the same time dispassionate - account of the period leading up to his father's death & his father's response to it: 'Sometimes I saw the fearin his eyes, but it would be gonein a flash; he was boxing it away from public view, as a good priest must.'
The second crisis is the breakdown of his marrige to Jean, a dance reviewer for The Seattle Times & twenty years younger than himself. Having read the book once before, I looked out more closely for the indicators of this the second time round. In Ketchikan, Raban makes a call to his wife & is bouyed up by the news that she has booked flight tickets to Juneau. In Meyers Creek, he starts to indulgein a happy mental shopping list of things he will buy for his wife & daugther, Julia - candied ginger (his father's favourite) for the seasick, Beanie Babies, matzohs, Travel Scrabble, M&Ms & herbal tea. Whilst sailing up the Gastineau Channel, the approach road to Juneau, he thinks five more days until their arrival.
However, he is troubled by Jean's sharp & irritable manner & finds her mood hard to fathom until she reveals, on an innocent outing to a playground near an old deserted goldmine, that she wants a seperation - 'To forge a new indentity,'in her own words. Thirty-six upspeakable hours later, Raban drives his wife (now the tungsten hard-eyed Ms Takimoto) & daughter to the airport before taking the boat back south to Seattle to complete his trip.
In the last section, Komogwa, the whole tone of the book changes as he tries to submerge his griefin his reading of Evelyn Waugh, William Cowper & Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Waugh provides some consolation through the transformation his own disastrous first marriage into triumphant, grave comedyin A Handful of Dust. Raban also copies a quotation into his logbook; 'Loss is nothing else but change, & change is Nature's delight.' Loss is a strong themein the narrative & Raban himself describes the themes of this beautifully crafted traveloguein his own inimitable, self-deprecating fashion:
"This book, like two or three others of mine, is really an attempt to write a kind of nonfiction novel. The grist of the material is factual - a narrative with people whose names you can look upin the phone book or who have historically verifiable existences - but it's fictionin the sense that it's heavily patterned & plotted; it's structured like a novel. There's a reason why it opens with a lummox on the first page, the fool on the dock. The whole book is about somebody who turns out to be a lummox, himself. It's the story of a traveling fool."
However, neither he nor his reader is fooled by the depth of his heartbreak as his solitary, highly courageous adventure finally ends at Marine Seattle & his moorings on Ewing Streetin sight of his house on the hill, ready to face the troubled waters that lie ahead.
Alone at Sea - By: J. Mcgregor, 25 Mar 2002 
A voyage into the myths, history & legends of the Northwest coast of Canada & Alaska, the reviews on the dust-jacket also promised that this was a voyage of self-discovery & a discourse on the nature of loss. Well, yes & no. There is no doubt that you'll leave this book with more than a passing acquaintance with the lives & times of both the American Indians & British explorers of earlier centuries, & you also leave it with more than a window into Raban's own life. Unfortunately, I found both subjects to be somewhat dull & uninspiring, like the scenery & sea that Raban passes through on his voyage.
This is a solitary account, & the biggest disappointmentin the book is that Raban hardly meets anyone upon the trip. Things tended to brighten up slightly when he does, & I found myself skipping pages to passages where he actually interacts with fellow human beings of this time & place instead of past ones. The outstanding chapter of the book concentrates upon his return to England to deal with his father's death & funeral. Surrounded by family, friends & memories, Raban becomes a warmer, fuller person than he ever does upon his boat, where he relies heavily on other people's recollections & histories to pad out his own.
As Raban often admits, non-sailors can find endless accounts of eddies, tides, squalls & whirlpools somewhat less than gripping, but you don't encounter much else alone on a boat! As the trip progresses, the author becomes increasingly remote & somewhat alienated from the people inhabiting the coast, & the book is poorer for it. It seemed to me that company would do him good, & the book is certainly better when he finds it.
The isolation continues as Raban attempts to call home to his wife & daughter from disconnected telephone networksin depopulated & broken down village ports, or fails to have his call answered when he does get through. You can sense there's a storm rising as he nears his final destination, & the ending doesn't disappointin this sense.
I finished the book with the notion that Jonathan Raban's next excursion needs to be a sail 'round the Greek Islands, droppingin frequently upon Club 18 - 30 drunken orgies. It would do him, & his readers, a power of good & put this rather morose meditation well behind him.
'Passage to Juneau, is a bleak but often humourous log. - By: Justine, 08 Dec 2001 Leaving Seattle on All Fool's Day 1993 Raban, a latecomer to sailing, sets out to explore the tortuous eccentricities of The Inside Passage north to Juneauin Alaska.He goes 'fishing for reflections.'Asin the myths & legends of the Native Americans he studies & interprets Raban finds that when one leaves the apparent sureties of home & community strange & inxeplicable events can occur.Like the heroin some contemporary Greek tragedy signs & omens oppress him, illusion & self-delusion shadow him.Ghosts track him;the original tribes,the moody,bellicose English explorer Captain Vancouver with his recalcitrant crew,fur traders,gold diggers,timbermen, tourists.All leave their tracks but as time passes nature returns & silently covers their trails.Is this a patternin the apparently all enveloping chaos?
Raban has a sardonic,renaissance mind but also the necessary authorial skills required to make this a stylistic & narrative tour de force.
Passage to Juneau is a personal log, a bleak but often humourous sagain which Raban charts & interprets his inner seascapes & attempts to pilot himself safely through the treacherous tides & shifting currents on which he sails.This is a masterpiece which goes on my shelf next to Peter Matthiessen's, 'The Snow Leopard', & Bruce Chatwin's,'In Patagonia'.
