Most books about the sea are not about the sea at all. Seafarers write of life afloat, of its pleasures and its pains, of companionship and solitude, perils and discoveries, the places visited and strange sights seen, but very rarely do they consider the stuff itself, that weird, wide medium on which they venture, the "salt/Unsown stirring fields", in Philip Larkin's term, that they must plough. Jonathan Raban is the splendid exception. His descriptions of water are distillations of pure poetry. Here he is on his way to Alaska when his boat is caught by a squall that turns calm water suddenly into a "short, steep, breaking sea":
Sunlit waves never frighten anyone half so much as the same waves under a sullen sky. These waves were full of light and life. The sun, shining clean through their tops, rendered them an opalescent milky green, which darkened, as the wave thickened around the middle, to the turquoise of a peacock's tail. Algae and phytoplankton gave them the colour of a coastal sea dense with vegetable matter, like frigid minestrone.
As the final simile indicates, Raban is no exquisite; he has a healthy respect for the sea in all its unpredictability, its moody vengefulness. He is not a natural sailor, as he admits, having come to sailing only when he was in his forties, and in Passage to Juneau, his account of a voyage from Seattle to Alaska, he admits that he is still, and likely always will be, afraid of the sea. "I fear the brushfire crackle of the breaking wave as it topples into foam; the inward suck of the tidal whirlpool; the loom of a big ocean swell, sinister and dark, in windless calm; the rip, the eddy, the race; the sheer abyssal depth of the water, as one floats like a trustful beetle on the surface tension."
It is this implacable alarm before the unhuman phenomenon of the sea that gives Raban's writing its depth; he is edgy and watchful, ever on the look-out for surprise and danger; his prose boggles at the sheer unlikeliness of the ocean and its deeps. As he sails northwards out of Seattle along Puget Sound, he gazes at the suburban hills sloping down to the water on either side, the neat bungalows and summer homes with their gazebos and ornamental statuary:
These impeccable lives were being conducted right on the lip of the abyss. Past the lawn statue of Cupid there yawned a world of frigid darkness, inhabited by slimy creatures with tentacles and fleshy suckers, of the kind that surface in exceptionally bad dreams. Did people know? Or was this a secret that realtors assiduously kept from their clients, like news of a projected neighbourhood methadone clinic?
Raban moved from his native England in 1990 to live in Seattle, on one of America's more polite outposts of wilderness, the Pacific North-West coast. Part of his reason for settling there was the city's situation at the southern end of the Inside Passage to Alaska, an "extraordinarily complicated" 1,000-mile sea route whose "aboriginal past - still tantalizingly close to hand - puts on terms of close kinship with the ancient sea of the Phoenicians and the Greeks". For a writer as restless and, in his peculiar way, as visionary as Raban, the Passage was an irresistible lure. His boat, built in Sweden in 1972 "as a smart cruising ketch", is a floating haven of orderly untidiness, where he can wallow in what seems for him to be the most perfect human state: cosiness. He is the laureate of cosiness. "Afloat, the boat was an unplace - a bubble world, off at a useful tangent to the insistent here-and-now of the American shoreline. Cramped, dark, and coffin-like, it was my Yaddo, my asylum, my ark."
He has been on many journeys, many voyages, but never before this one has he felt so acutely the wrench of leaving home, for now he has an American wife, and a three-year-old daughter, Julia, to whom the book is dedicated. On the eve of departure, Julia, trying to cope with the unfamiliarity of grief, hits on a bright formulation: "I don't mind, I won't miss you. I love Mommy more than you."
Travelling always entails infidelity. You do your best to mask the feeling of sly triumph that comes with turning your back on home and all it stands for; but disappearing into the crowd in the departure lounge, or stowing your bags in the car at dawn, you know you're a rat. I was an experienced deserter, but never until now had I been squarely faced with my treachery.
A weaker will might have quailed, but not Raban's; despite his child's tears and his wife's hard stare, he hits the sea-roads.
Accompanying him on his voyage of self-discovery is the story of the hapless Englishman, Captain Vancouver, who with his restive crew of 99 arrived at the strait of Juan de Fuca in April 1792, intent on claiming the north-west coast for the Crown. Vancouver was a prematurely aged young man, fat, choleric, possibly half-mad; his crew was largely composed of aristocratic young gentlemen, Romantics to a man, come to these wild parts in search of the Sublime. They looked down on their low-born captain, and in return he made their lives a misery, with all manner of restrictions, impositions, and the occasional flogging. Raban's wonderfully immediate account of the expedition is not the least of the pleasures of his book. Along the route in Vancouver's day were the native Americans, the sea-going tribes of so-called Indians, the Salish, Kwakiutl, Haida, Tsimshian and Tlingit, whose art fascinates and enchants Raban: "Its whole formal conception and composition were rooted in the Indians' experience of water . . ." He sees in their "rage for symmetry" the influence of mirror-reflections in water, while the typical recurring ovoid shape employed by the Indian artists "was exactly that of the tiny capillary wave raised by a cat's-paw of wind, as it catches the light and makes a frame for the sun". It is a tribute to Raban's descriptive powers, as well as to his enthusiasm, that without a single illustration he still manages to communicate a vivid sense of this rich artistic tradition.
His passage to Juneau (pronounced Juno) proves to be a voyage of discovery in more ways than he had bargained for. Halfway along it, he discovers that his father is dying, and he flies home to be there for the end. This is a moving sequence in the book, though the narrative barely survives the shock of interruption.
More problematic still, for the reader as well as for the writer, is the marital storm that Raban sails into at the close of the book. Arrived at his destination, he is met by his wife, who tells him she wants a separation. The scene is written like a passage from a standard Hampstead Heath divorce novel, complete with dispiritingly flat and all-too-convincing dialogue: "I have to take charge of my own life. I can't go on depending on you for handouts like I've been doing. I have to get my shit together." No doubt this is how people speak at such moments, but one cannot suppress the faint suspicion that Raban is exacting a mild revenge: "Her voice was dry, curt, void of tone and colour. Jean had many voices. This was her Manhattan voice." Earlier, Raban had told us that Jean harbours ambitions to write fiction, so perhaps someday soon she, too, will be avenged in cold, or even "dry, curt", print.
It would be unjust to leave the book floundering in these brackish waters; there have been too many delights along the way. Not the least of them is the revelation of the unsuspected nautical basis of so many terms in the English language. Did you know the derivation of such sayings as "the bitter end", "plain (correctly plane) sailing", "by and large", being "taken aback" or "standing aloof"? Well, Passage to Juneau can tell you.
John Banville is a novelist and Chief Literary Critic and Associate Literary Editor of the Irish Times.