Stateless in Seattle

How come the Great Seattle Writer is an Englishman? And how did he turn his snug aerie on North Queen Anne Hill into a bully pulpit to preach the gospel of good sense and good taste to the nations, via the most respected publications in New York and London (plus Seattle Weekly and Playboy) and a string of best-selling, award-winning, uncategorizable books that mix fiction, memoir, lit crit, political polemics, history, Northwest art history, anthropology, and travel writing into a chimera-style quite his own?

And how is it that the most recent book by this "regional" writer— My Holy War: Dispatches From the Home Front (New York Review Books, $21.95), which he'll read from this week at Town Hall (see box, p. 23)— captures snapshots of the entire American political experience from 9/11 through August 2005? My Holy War is a kind of diary chronicling the shocks of our epoch: the attacks, George W. Bush's assault on American democracy, our traumatized attempt to fathom the Islamists' motives and divine their next target, the weird mirroring of Islamofascists by U.S. neo-Puritans, the false dawn of Howard Dean, and Bush's ugly second coming. And it's all very specifically described through the lens of the Seattle body politic. Instead of theorizing about the national mood the day after the election in the manner of standard gasbag national pundits, Jonathan Raban reports the immediate reactions of his friends and neighbors; instead of passively accepting big-picture notions like the red state–blue state schism, he relies on his own research and ramblings to recast the problem as a conflict between Seattle and the Twin Peaks countryside.

Raban is not large—he's lean as a strip of buffalo meat—but he contains multitudes of contradictions. He covers the world war from the Queen Anne home front. He's a backwater media critic chronically sought out by media monoliths—when Frank Rich wants to bash Bush, he reaches for the well-wrought truncheon of a Raban quote. Raban is bookish to the point of donnish abandon, yet his most biblio-bibulous lucubrations are anchored by global shoe-leather reporting going back a quarter-century.

Pigeonholed by many as a travel writer after his reputation-making 1979 Arabia: A Journey Through the Labyrinth and 1981's Old Glory, a quirky, snarky account of his trip down the Mississippi River, he is, in fact, far more esoteric than even the most literary of conventional travel writers, like Jan Morris (and far more reliable than the most esoteric, like slippery Bruce Chatwin). Raban proves that travel needn't be a confining aesthetic ghetto: His fellow best-selling eccentric globe-trotter Bill Bryson intensely envies Raban's ability to describe each new wave of the sea in language that's precise, original, and poetically right, and the British author Adam Nicolson has called Raban's 1999 Passage to Juneau "a kind of anti-Odyssey" wherein Penelope gives the hero the heave-ho—and adds that Homer is a travel writer, too. If anything connects Raban with the mainstream, it's the way he fulfills W.H. Auden's crack about the genre: "It's in keeping with the best traditions/For Travel Books to wander from the point." Raban does so gloriously, constantly changing tack, yet with a sailor's unerring sense for the utterly idiosyncratic literary destination he has in mind.

He also loathes being dubbed a regional writer, and he's right. Granted, he has nailed the Northwest sense of place as well as anybody ever—Mary McCarthy, Betty MacDonald, Murray Morgan, Tom Robbins, David Guterson, Timothy Egan, Bruce Barcott—in prose more subtly sinewy than any of them (with the possible exception of Richard Hugo). "But he transcends the regional-writer rubric the way Faulkner did," says former Amazon.com literature editor James Marcus. "He finds all the human qualities in his own backyard." Except Faulkner was ineradicably rooted in Mississippi soil, while Raban is stateless in Seattle. That's why he can see things the rest of us overlook.

Adds Marcus, "The guy in his novel Foreign Land spends 30 years running a ship bunker in Africa—a kind of offshore gas station for passing vessels. In other words, his business is talking to people who don't set foot on dry land. And when he returns to England, he promptly buys a boat himself, and only there, as we're told on the last page, is he home and dry. Well, that's Jonathan's MO. When I interviewed him in 1996, you could actually see his boat from his house, anchored at one end of the Ship Canal. That seemed like a necessity to him—a means of escape."

Raban was stateless to start with. He hesitates even to specify which patch of English turf he springs from—his upbringing was peripatetic, and when he gazed at a stream by one of his childhood homes, he fantasized it was Huck Finn's river. When he followed in Huck's wake, the place became Raban's and his alone. "What's unusual is to have a regional writer be an outsider all the time," says Marcus. Lots of Brit expatriates yearn for home, but when Raban's fictional Brit returns after decades in Africa, the foreign land in question was England. The running gag in his homecoming memoir, Coasting, is that his old haunts in England are an alien place. His sole home is the here and now, of which he makes the reader an instant honorary citizen in scenes lit with pinpoint lightning.