Best find yet from the free little library box in my neighbourhood. My edition is from the 1980s and doesn't have a subtitle. I was really drawn in to Raban's prose but part way through the book was a little disappointed that (a) he doesn't talk about that many British coast towns (I can only remember the Isle of Man, Fowey, Brighton, Rye, London, Hull, Essex) - that's what the book is supposed to be about! and (b) he seems to have a passive-agressive vendetta against Paul Theroux, which he insists on mentioning in a round-about way. That said, his understanding of the changing English lifestyle of the 1980s (moving into a conservative, warmongering, service-economy, recession, strike-busting, tourist-courting kitschy kind of place) is really beautiful, as is his grappling with his own inertia. He's probably the only one who could ever sell you on Essex life, swamp, smugness and all.
“Knocking about from port to port, you keep on going past the port you originally started out from. In that regard at least, coasting is a lot more lifelike than those epic journeys which reduce the world to a magnificent straight line of conquest; and the coaster’s chronic itch, to be moving on only in order to get nearer home, his never-quite-knowing whether he’s returning or running away, are more real, in a daily way, than the exotic compulsions of the serious travelers who voyage intrepidly from A to Z” (p.301).
Do You like book Coasting: A Private Voyage (2003)?
Reading this book at the moment and finding it very satisfying and up there with Passage to Juneau - by the same author and in a similar vein. I do worry about his relationships with women though. At the start he decribes being galvanised by earlier sailing books written by authors with "philistine certainties .... and chauvinistic attitudes towards women". Not referring to himself of course, but most of the characters he connects with in the book are men, and he talks about his relationship with his boat as if it were a person. I suppose his sailing experiences are deeply and essentially solitary and it is within this reference frame that he is at his most creative. In the Passage to Juneau he does his best writing after his partner has left him and he goes on alone...... go figure
—Greg
