FATHER AND SON

The late travel writer and playwright interweaves a tale of recovery from a stroke with wartime reminiscences of his father.

Always a lucid, perceptive writer, Raban (1942-2023) sets out by reckoning that a life-transforming medical event was touched off by a lifetime of iffy habits: “Smoking was a key symptom of the life I’d led, my inhibited recklessness, my short horizons, my readiness to take risks without sufficient thought for the likely consequences.” Pondering his friends who were also felled by smoking, his thoughts turn to his college-bound daughter and from her to his parents and a father he met only when he was 3 because of the intervention of World War II. Raban examines diaries, photo albums, and a trove of memories to piece together his father’s wartime service, about which, in the manner of veterans of horrific combat, his father spoke very little. Evacuated at Dunkirk—a rescue operation somewhat less heroic than the “favorite trope for Conservative politicians” that it would become—the author’s father went on to serve in North Africa, Italy, and Palestine, where he spent enough time patrolling the souks that he returned “a man who did his best to avoid all shops except tobacconists’ and those that sold secondhand books.” Reaching across the generations helped occupy Raban’s mind in recovery, and his experiences as a patient will ring true to anyone who has spent significant time in the hospital. The author did get the approval of his doctor to have a little wine with his meals, whereupon friend Paul Theroux sent him half a case of pinot noir: “Sure that such a quantity of wine would be considered contraband here, I hid it as best I could behind the clothes in the closet.” Happily, as Raban regained his health, he arrived at a more complete and understanding portrait of his parents and the privations of war.

A touching farewell from a careful, thoughtful observer of life.