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.
