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[Raban continues]... in some New England schoolyard. Wonderful—and so modernist. To my mind, postmodernism isn't some David Letterman-like routine of ironizing everything so much as it is what architects mean by the word: expose the artifice, open the building up to show the pipes and beams. Which is, I think, or hope, roughly what my own books do: they interrogate the reading that has gone into them, try to show a mind shaped by other books, emphasize the relative and the personal, avoid the vatic. They're all—fiction and nonfiction—provisional takes on the world. For a good long while I liked the "travel book" as a form because it was so formless and modest and seemingly ingenuous. Oh, I just went on this trip, and this is how I recollect it now. Unfortunately, I got taken literally by reviewers. A bit like one saying "Oh, I don't do anything much" to someone at a party and being taken at one's word.... I should have said I'm a sly postmodernist. There's an irony in the books, not Lettermanish at all, but unconfessed. So I guess the pipes and beams do remain concealed, despite my attempts to expose them.

LRS: Far from keeping your reading hidden from your readers, you often make your reading a character of sorts in your work. I think one of the distinctive qualities of your writing comes from the sense that we are thinking along with you as you write, and that the library in your head is always present as a set of maps by which you navigate your encounters with people and ideas. Perhaps this is true of all writers, but it seems that for you, books are especially insistent presences. Has it ever been the case that the library in your mind threatened to overshadow, rather than illuminate, what you were writing about?

Raban: As for books "overshadowing" rather than "illuminating" what I write—maybe they do, but what I was aiming for was a deliberate foregrounding of their presence, to say, "This is where I'm coming from, this is what shapes these remarks, this passage." Beams and pipes again. Perhaps it's worth saying that in Surveillance—a novel that comes out this September in the U.K., next January in the U.S.—the only book of any importance is a memoir that may or may not be faked. That's central to the plot, but otherwise the characters live relatively book-free lives. Indeed, books are seen as a potential earthquake hazard, likely to brain someone when they fly off the shelves in a big temblor, and are dismissed by the Chinese owner of the apartment block as "storybooks." Come to think of it, Pride and Prejudice does get to figure, somewhat importantly, in Surveillance, but otherwise I'm a reformed character. Temporarily so. I'm afraid that in a novel I've recently started, Twain, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Jack London, along with the landscape paintings of Albert Bierstadt, do get a lot of play, but it's also about Englishmen, video games, and murder.

LRS: As someone who identifies with the introspective, somewhat misanthropic narrator of Passage to Juneau, I can hardly imagine myself successfully connecting with the loggers, fishermen, resort-keepers, shipyard workers, and roustabouts who people the book. Yet it's clear that Jonathan Raban the writer, if not Jonathan Raban the narrator, has connected. Many of the small revelations in your work stem from encounters with people who may not share your cultural assumptions, who have not read the books you read, and who react warily to your accent or your manner. The drama inheres in your recognition, and occasional bridging, of the gulf separating you and them. Do you carry this drama in mind when you meet such people? Is it part of the artifice created when the journey ends and the writing begins? (I think here of your discussion in For Love and Money of travel books that appear decades after the fact.) Is there some tension between the character you present in the story and the writer who gets the story? If so, how do you negotiate this?

Raban: I think you've largely answered your question. The writer, looking back at the journey from a distance of a year or two (or three), is a different character from the hapless character who undertook the trip: wise after the event, with the leisure to tease out meanings from the experience that the distracted traveler never had, and often impatient with his alter ego's blinkered and unsatisfactory version of things. I am not him....

Writing from memory, not from a notebook, has always seemed important, even though it's necessarily impressionist and inexact in regard to the literal facts of the experience. When traveling, I usually keep a notebook: when home at my desk, the notebook serves mainly to remind me how little I saw at the time, or rather how I was noticing the wrong things. But the notes do spur memories, and it's the memories I trust. The wine stain on the page may tell me more than the words there, which usually strike me as hopelessly inadequate or off at some irrelevant tangent (irrelevant, I mean, to the story I'm trying to unfold on the typed or printed page).

Memory and imagination are inseparable powers. Memory shapes, distills, exaggerates, orders—and ruthlessly loses what it doesn't need for its own storytelling purposes. I wouldn't trust memory in a courtroom but I trust it absolutely in a book. I can't write until memory has done its job, which it does slowly, over months and sometimes years. (It took me three years to get around to writing Coasting after I finished piloting a boat around the British Isles—much of the time was spent writing a novel—Foreign Land—while I let the voyage settle in the back of my mind.)

You talk of my "introspection" and "misanthropy." I can't speak for the second, but there's precious little room for introspection when one's managing a boat in a small gale, or trying to immerse oneself in the lives of long-gone homesteaders in a ruined Montana shack. Introspection comes much later, to the writer at his keyboard rather than to the person he once was, in oilskins or snake boots, too busy with the here and now to give much of a thought to himself.

As for "connecting" with "loggers, fishermen, etc," I do find this hard to square with my supposed misanthropy. I like being away from home, living among strangers, and I am always fascinated by other people's lives in a landscape that's alien terrain for me. A sense of my own displacement in the world fuels my appreciation of people who are, or seem, more securely placed in their own geography.

I might add that the term "travel writing" sets my teeth on edge: when I hear the term, all I see is the Travel section of the Sunday paper, and journalists sampling free vacations. My books have never been like that—or so I hope and pray. The "travel" bit has never been more than a

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