Mea culpa: I loved “Out of Africa” when I first read it in my early 20s, and my bookcases are filled with the works of all the writers cited above, and many more. I have first editions of Wilfred Thesiger’s “Arabian Sands” and Henry Morton Stanley’s “Through the Dark Continent” and Fleming’s “One’s Company,” to name but a few.
But luckily Raban made a wheels-screeching turn for such an Englishman: He became fascinated with, and then emigrated to, the most savage land of all, the United States of America. There he met his match. In the United States, he wasn’t the most competent representative of the most civilized society any longer. Out on the Mississippi River or the Great Plains or off the coast of Alaska, Raban was overwhelmed. By history. Scale.
“The prairie made all my received ideas about landscape seem cramped and stultified,” he writes in “Bad Land,” his paean to the scrubland prairies of eastern Montana. One afternoon he joined a cattle branding. “I watched through a fog of dust,” he writes, “rapt. It was like ballet, or football — people working in consort, wordlessly, with technical grace, and at speed.
At first, that is; until, bit by bit, something remarkable and beautiful and ever so subtle grows, and “Father and Son” becomes Raban’s finest and most moving book. Hoping to be released from the rehab unit in two weeks, he must endure it for five, and come to grips with the truth that he’ll never regain the ability to sail a boat, use his right hand or walk more than a few halting steps. He has been “transformed into an old man quite suddenly,” just “three days short of my sixty-ninth birthday.
Carl Hoffman is the author of five books, including “Liar’s Circus,” “The Last Wild Men of Borneo” and “Savage Harvest.”