Jonathan Raban, by contrast, sets out on a far more modest–and ultimately far more successful–voyage in “Passage to Juneau” (435 pages. Pantheon. $26.50). Sailing from Seattle to Alaska, he aims to replicate the 1792 explorations of English Capt. George Vancouver. Along the way he turns his book into a deliberately self-conscious critique of travel writing’s moth-eaten assumptions about the sublimity of nature. “I sailed through a logjam of dead literary cliche: snowcapped peaks above, fathomless depths below…” Then, suddenly, in the middle of his trip, Raban’s father dies and a clever account of an interesting trip suddenly turns deeply personal. In the last half of the book, Raban finishes out his itinerary while reckoning with his father’s memory. He is much less glib than when he started–“Death is a wilderness in which everyone is lost for words”–and what had been a good travel book becomes a journey of the soul.
