In 2011, at the age of 68, the critic and novelist Jonathan Raban “was transformed into an old man”. What felt vaguely like a hangover was diagnosed a few hours later as a stroke. With the right side of his body paralysed, Raban spent time in intensive care before being transferred to the neurological ward of the Swedish hospital in downtown Seattle (born in Norfolk, he moved to the US in 1990). He left in a wheelchair five weeks later and survived for more than a decade, dying in January this year. During that time he worked on a memoir.
It’s a brave book, not so much because of the physical difficulties he overcame in writing it, but because it takes him back to childhood and to the challenges his absent father endured during the second world war as an officer with the 67th Field regiment. Like most former servicemen, Peter, later a clergyman, didn’t talk much about his wartime experiences, dramatic though they were: Dunkirk, Tunisia, Anzio, Palestine. But the letters he exchanged with his young wife Monica disclose some of what he went through, albeit toned down to avoid alarm (“In my father’s reported war virtually nobody died, ever”). And to track his father’s wartime journey Raban supplements those letters with his own extensive reading and research.
It’s an odd book too, revealing little of the life his father led after coming home from war and even less about Raban’s own, as a hemiplegic, after leaving hospital. But his account of rehab is compelling. And his parents’ letters are eloquent and impassioned; Peter is a keen-eyed observer of the places he visits and Monica (who as a teenager had published stories under a pseudonym in women’s magazines) sends perky news from the home front. It’s a tale of cruelly separated newlyweds, and between the lines there’s a second love story as Raban celebrates his teenage daughter, Julia, whose promptness in getting him to hospital saved his life.
Frustrated at the prospect of losing abilities he once took for granted, whether driving a car or messing about on boats, Raban isn’t an easy patient. Any condescension or infantilising makes him livid and his outbursts drive some staff members away. But he hits it off with others, above all with his physical therapist Kelli, whose laughter raises his spirits. He’s honest about his anxieties, his sudden proneness to tears and his woeful appearance (“sleepless, pasty-faced, in need of a haircut and hollow-eyed like a raccoon after a night spent communing with the dregs of liquor bottles among the trash cans”). But he can still read and uses his Kindle to access a range of enlightening stuff – from the work of historian Tony Judt to two books about strokes by Robert McCrum and Sheila Hale.
His parents’ letters are a tougher read. Beyond the amorosity (“My very ow (to remedy which he was allowed the rare luxury of bananas), he nonetheless alarmed Peter, who feared he’d be the cuckoo in the marital love-nest. The father-son relationship suffered as a result.n & dearest Beloved”), there’s Peter’s antisemitism (Jews, he said, were like “bloodsucking lice on the backs of swallows”) and his and Monica’s dismay at the Tories’ defeat in the 1945 general election (“Socialist gains all round – devastating!”, “State control! Ugh!”). Class snobbery is persistent too: young Jonathan was banned from playing with “the village children” and rather than go to a local “knocky-down school” was sent to a “motley collection” of other kinds, none of them rewarding. A fragile child, thought to have a wasting disease(to remedy which he was allowed the rare luxury of bananas), he nonetheless alarmed Peter, who feared he’d be the cuckoo in the marital love-nest. The father-son relationship suffered as a result.
In a long career, Raban was best known as a travel writer. But he disliked the label and rightly felt that his books (nearly 20 of them) offered insights of a different kind; people and politics mattered more to him than places. Any book, he thought, should roam as freely as it likes and this final volume is an illustration of that, taking in everything from his mother’s beloved Ford (“licence plate AUP 595”), his granny’s extravagant cigarettes and his father’s “equanimity in situations of extreme peril”, to the strange good humour he felt after his stroke. “The elation hasn’t completely abandoned me even now, more than twelve years later,” he writes, and that’s what makes his memoir so lively, even when it stares death in the face.
• Father and Son by Jonathan Raban is published by Picador (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
