Channels Foreign Land

By Paul Gray

English Author Jonathan Raban, 43, has earned a reputation as a diverting guide for armchair tourists. His best-known travel books are Arabia: A Journey Through the Labyrinth (1979) and Old Glory (1981), a Huckleberry Finnish, updated account of a journey down the Mississippi. With much of the world left to explore and write about, Raban has elected to make a voyage of a different and distinctly perilous kind. Foreign Land is his first novel.

Its hero is George Grey, who at age 60 is being gently bumped from the last outpost of his expatriate career. The government of Montedor, a former (and fictional) Portuguese colony on the west coast of Africa, has decided it no longer requires his services to oversee the refueling and supplying of passing ships. Grey does not place particular value on his job, the running of "a sort of gas station cum grocer's shop." But he will miss Bom Porto, the seedy, seductive capital of his adopted country, and his mistress Vera, a black woman of commanding girth and friendliness. Leaving her bed on one of the final mornings before his exile home, "George felt posthumous."

England holds little of substance for its prodigal son. He makes an effort to catch up on popular culture by way of television, and fails: "The jokes were unanswerable riddles. He watched, baffled, as a housewife on a quiz show identified six different TV series from a medley of their signature tunes." Sheila, his daughter from a marriage that failed long ago, is approaching 40 and has become an author of trendy, feminist nonfiction. Taking a taxi to visit her, Grey marvels at the rudeness of his driver and at the deteriorating London landscape: "It looked a lawless country. The blocks of workers' flats were dirtier, more sprawled and raggedy, than those of Accra and Dar Es Salaam; there was more trash blowing in the streets than there was in Lagos. Everywhere there were slogans, spraygunned on walls, signboards, standing sheets of corrugated iron."

George's other responsibility is his late parents' retirement home in a tiny coastal village in Cornwall. He settles there because he has nowhere else to go, but he looks seaward and makes odious comparisons: "In Bom Porto, the Atlantic was milky green, thick as soup. At this time of year it swarmed with plankton, and in certain lights you seemed to see the sea wriggle with life. It was easy to imagine the first things crawling out of it and starting in on their colonial adventure. This northern sea was different, more coldly sophisticated. If you thought about the things that came out of it, they weren't innocent. Celtic saints with prophecies . . . shipwrecked sailors . . . wartime mines."

As the British Empire has receded, the number of repatriated and disgruntled ex-colonials in English novels has swelled proportionately. Raban makes some good, Waugh-style fun out of the stultifying routines among the elderly who, like Grey, have reluctantly adopted Cornwall as their final resting place. At one Christmas cocktail party, the young people serving refreshments surreptitiously compete with each other, awarding themselves points every time they hear a guest say "When I was" or "When we were." But Raban does not leave his hero stranded in such desiccated company. On a whim, Grey purchases an old fishing trawler that has been converted into a ketch. He thinks that this "tubby dreamboat" will provide the freedom he needs to determine his whereabouts: "It felt like a bitter lifetime since he'd climbed on to the plane in Bom Porto, yet he still hadn't managed to actually arrive in England. Going to sea, he might--just might--manage to come home."

An engaging travelogue ensues. Grey plans to sail east through the English Channel and then up the Thames to pay another call on his daughter in London. His journey is made difficult by bad weather and the persistence of memories. As the winds and waters rise, his cabin is invaded by a crowd of people from his past life. There is his ex-wife Angela, looking exactly like the beautiful spoiled socialite he met in wartime London. His clergyman father appears, along with friends from Bom Porto and Sheila, somehow restored to the young girlhood he had cherished. His literal journey can be plotted across the southern coast of England: Dartmouth, Lyme Regis and Weymouth. But his forward progress accompanies an equally relentless plunge into the past.

The alert traveler notices and stores up every snippet of interest. Raban garnishes Grey's odyssey with plenty of details: "Each time the lighthouse flashed, he checked the bearing of the boat against the shore and clung to the number. 180 degrees . 184 degrees . 177 degrees ." Such raw information will probably baffle most landlubbers. Worse, it increasingly obscures the hero's reasons for being on the water in the first place. Raban's debut as a novelist is impressive, both in its verbal fluency and in the broad social portrait it deftly conveys. But Foreign Land betrays a few too many of its author's extraneous skills to be wholly successful. In the end, a fascinating portrait of a body and mind adrift gradually yaws into a manual of navigation.