In Waxwings Jonathan Raban triumphantly transfers the skills of an award-winning travel writer to his second novel. (The first was written 18 years ago.) Like the author, the principal character has moved from Britain to Seattle, ‘where herring gulls were a traffic hazard and all streets led down to the water’. Tom Janeway is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington with a minor reputation for his short radio talks. But this is not the satirical university world of David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury. Millennium-year America (just before the dotcom bubble bursts and before 9/11) is vividly and amusingly evoked, but the excesses and ambiguities of a society which is both provincial and vibrantly international are observed with tolerant understanding. Raban sees America with an incomer’s clarity and a resident’s affection.
Tom is ‘more a bookworm than a novelist’, most at home among the characters of Victorian fiction whom he studies but also living in the same world as the rest of us, ‘some of the time anyhow’ as a police officer concedes while interviewing him.
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