Coping with the lie of the land

The landscape of the American prairie - flat, empty, desolate, relentlessly receding space - is an unpromising place to set a travel book, but this is not so much a travel book as an elegiac biography of those anonymous homesteaders who, beguiled by cheap land, cheap novels and cheap promotional literature, left their barber's shops and schools and factories and attempted to make a garden out of a pitiless wilderness. Some succeeded, and stayed; most failed, and moved on. Raban charts the journeys of both, and celebrates both success and failure in prose of chiselled elegance and haunting humanity. His use of source material is stunningly creative: here is the Chainman's Oath, taken by the land surveyors who marked Montana out in saleable squares: "I, -----, do solemnly swear that I will well and faithfully execute the duties of chainman; that I will level the chain upon even and uneven ground, and plumb the tally pins . .

." In the same paragraph Raban records that of fourteen surveyors-general of Montana between 1867 and 1925, two were removed from office, one was suspended and four were forced to resign when found to be in possession of some of the "interesting perks and opportunities" of the job. The nitty-gritty of the American dream doesn't come much grittier than this.