Jonathan Raban completed this, his last testament, just before he died, aged 80, in January. As well as a leave-taking, it offers a belated salute to a father from his son. The title echoes the great Edmund Gosse memoir of 1907, a reckoning of filial relations that shocked its Edwardian readership and broached a new candour in life-writing. This new Father and Son will cause nothing like the sensation that Gosse’s did, though it does teasingly hint at the ambiguous blessing of a father who doubles as a man of the cloth.
A British exile in Seattle since 1990, Raban was one of those writers who stood at an angle to his native land. A keen sailor, a journeyman and latterly father of a teenage daughter, he occupies a strange space in Anglo-American letters, the language casually adoptive (“math”, “faucet”, etc), the temperament defiantly of the old country – exacting, proud, somewhat pedantic. He is a writer always on his guard, a good listener, and wonderfully quick to take offence.
