A splendid writer whose prose, like his mellifluous conversation, is both elegant and erudite, Jonathan Raban has been informing and entertaining readers for four decades. As a novelist, essayist, columnist, and travel writer, Raban’s literary output has encompassed everything from politics and economics to the world of nature and the travails of the human heart. An English expatriate, Raban has made his home in Seattle since 1990. Two of his novels are set in Seattle and the Puget Sound: Waxwings and his most recent book Surveillance. During his tenure here, Raban has in the most thorough fashion become immersed in the rich history and unique landscape of the Northwest. And he can relate his knowledge, observations, and insights with an almost professorial command.

Though Raban is well known for his contributions to the literature of travel, he does not consider himself to be truly a world traveler. He contends that there are still too many places he has never visited. Still, those vicinities of our globe he has explored and the writings he has subsequently rendered remain a memorable record of an engaging and ever-curious literary intellect. On a recent sunny spring day in Seattle, Raban shared his thoughts on a variety of topics. For this interlocutor, it was a fascinating exchange.

Novelist and essayist Jonathan Raban looks at the creeping erosion of the right to privacy in his new novel Surveillance. Photo by Rob Casey.

In your writing, you take note of homelessness and related social issues. Would you comment on the implications of the deepening social inequities in our society?

It’s an almost impossibly broad subject. In 1990, when I first arrived here, Seattle was such a different city. You could stand on Seattle’s waterfront and see the whole story of Seattle there. A Japanese freighter laden with raw timber, a gill netter laying his net, a tug pulling a large raft of logs. There was something wonderfully logical about Seattle. You could squint and imagine Seattle as it was in 1850. A natural deep water harbor, its ancient forest, and its first big business: Henry Yesler’s sawmill. That mill began the inevitable progress to boat building, canneries, and so forth. William Boeing started in the timber business. Then he hired shipwrights to build his first airplanes. Thus those planes look like avian boats. The transition from boat building to aircraft building was utterly logical. Even after the Microsoft eruption, there was this connection between Seattle and its hinterland. Seattle was a regional city with enormous reach. It kept Alaska in its back pocket. Its magnetic range stretched back over the Cascades and over the Rocky Mountains.

The hinterland now looks to Seattle for entertainment, shopping, and sports. Seattle used to look to its hinterland and was intimately connected to those skills — logging, fishing, whatever — because they were the original source of its wealth. Now Seattle has become a post-regional city.

What do you mean by post-regional city? That Seattle is now part of the global economy?

The global economy is more concerned with the hourly fluctuation of the ticker tape, of the NASDAQ, than it is with the hinterland. Does Seattle give a thought to Forks, WA? Forks may still look to Seattle, but Seattle doesn’t look to Forks. Seattle has become Greater Seattle. Outside of this metropolitan region the per capita income slides down precipitously — from $30,000 per year for every man woman and child to $13,000 per year per capita. This is an amazingly steep cliff. We are looking at cultural, political, and theological differences east of the mountains. The wet West and the dry West are totally incomprehensible.

What about disparities within our own city?

Yes. Earlier this afternoon I was on a boat with a commercial fisherman. And even though we all have to eat, the fishing industry does not provide an income which allows a fisherman to buy a home in Seattle today. The disparity between Seattle and its hinterland is now a disparity within the city itself. Contrast jobs within the virtual world and jobs in the physical world. Where do you find today’s welders? Where are the manual jobs and skills that used to make Seattle? The manual economy is pushed aside and the result is a huge polarization between Old Seattle and New Seattle.

I’d like to ask you about poetry and its role in our world. You knew Robert Lowell. He was once invited to a cultural evening at the Kennedy White House. He learned later that the seventh fleet changed positions in the course of the night and nobody had asked his opinion.

Lowell was virtually the last poet in America to seriously and effectively address the public world. Readership for poetry has diminished fantastically since 1970. A poem like “Waking Early Sunday Morning” addresses the life of this country in the middle of the Vietnam War. It is a poem that can be read and reread because it speaks sanity to a world at war. Its relevance has increased in the context of Iraq.

Contemporary poets have not risen to the challenge of writing about the times. Literature now means the novel. Poets seemed to get used to writing these tiny pieces of their personal perceptions. No one today has the literary ambition of a Lowell, an Auden, an Eliot, or a Yeats. Up to the 1970s, you could hardly be a literate person and not read Lowell. Today — outside of Seamus Heaney — I can’t think of anybody. Too much contemporary poetry seems too inadequate to the occasion: it is self-regarding, small, private, too-private, insufficiently connected to the public world, insufficiently resonant, insufficiently aware of itself as a poem. I think the quality of poetry has diminished.

What a great poet really does is resonate with his own age. I don’t mean just protest writing. I mean to complicatedly engage with the age, as Auden, Yeats, and Lowell did. Like Marvell and Tennyson of a previous generation did. There’s not an age in the past where you cannot find poetry that does not resonate with that age. It is the fault of the poet who fails to create the resonance. Poets could be essential, but name a poet today who is essential.

Who are the contemporary writers who are doing good work?

I’m the wrong person to ask. I’m too old. I read writers from my own generation and older.

Who among them is still worth reading?

Philip Roth at his best speaks to me with extraordinary intimacy. There’s Ian McEwan, Saul Bellow, and Bernard Malamud. Malamud wrote the very best novel I’ve ever read about the Pacific Northwest. It’s entitled A New Life and set in a place called Cascadia College, which is transparently Corvallis. A former alcoholic New Yorker comes to teach freshman English. Set in the era of McCarthyism, it’s a collision of East Coast sensibility and the strange new world of the West Coast. It is immensely funny and witty, beautifully done, and wonderfully right about the landscape of the Pacific Northwest.

You’ve referred to your recent novel Surveillance — which takes place in Seattle and places nearby — as a comedy of manners. But I think you may have underestimated how much of an impact the slightly shifted environment you’ve limned has on a reader. It’s not a completely totalitarian environment by any means, but it is unsettling.

Those things are happening already. I depict only a slight change from the present.

Is it a cautionary novel?

There is a lot of apprehension in it. We have reason to feel apprehension. There is a sense of society beginning to slightly slide. Consider climate change. You have a period in which almost nothing seems to be happening, but things are indeed happening in the environment. Then you have something precipitous, a possibly never recoverable slide.

I had chills go down my spine when last year Justice Sandra Day O’Connor warned that the slide into dictatorship begins with attacks on the Judiciary. I had a hand in getting that story out. Beyond a piece on NPR there was almost nothing elsewhere in the American media about O’Connor’s remarks. I notified the Guardian and they had heard nothing. So I was asked to write a piece. Then the Guardian’s Washington correspondent was put on the story and it made the front page. Newspapers in America then began to pick up on it, but it still never got the coverage it should have. O’Connor’s speech was very important and exactly right for these times. She was stating that the slide out of democracy begins with small incremental steps. And we are now witness to such events and we should pay attention. But I don’t think that America is turning into a fascist state, and I am much cheered by this past November’s election. A sense of hope has returned. I eagerly await the end of this terrible regime.

I recently reviewed Andrew Sullivan’s new book, The Conservative Soul. It was the sunniest political piece I’ve written in years. I was able to write about the breakup, the crackup, of the hideous Rove alliance. They’re never going to be able to patch together this thing again, this unholy alliance of right-wing Christians and government.

We now have this global contention — the godly against the godly — and it is the most frightening thing we contemplate in this century: the true believers who replace knowledge, experience, and curiosity with blind faith. That applies as much to Bush as to the Islamists. The intellectually closed and conceited world of Christian fundamentalism seems to be hugely dangerous and not to be tolerated. Do I want fundamentalists of any stripe, whether they are Christians or Muslims, in an ideal world? No.

In your book My Holy War you mention a Pentagon study on climate change which made news in Europe but was not mentioned here in the U.S.

That study came out at a time when we had in this country a particularly supine press. The press would not remotely suggest that the actions of this government were potentially disastrous, whether the subject was Iraq or climate change. I think the press has recovered a little spine since then. And it is being violently reminded of its errors in its reporting leading up to the Iraq war. One hopes that the American press will never again trade independence of mind for access as they did in the early days of the Bush presidency and after 9/11.