AT about the time the late Bruce Chatwin was revitalising the travel book, a literary movement of sorts began to merge travel writing, reportage and autobiography. The genre was assisted and encouraged, perhaps even indulged, by Bill Buford's Granta magazine. While novelists enjoyed writing memoir type pieces for Buford's exciting journal, war correspondents and other journalists became increasingly interested in personalised observation and factual pieces loosely categorised as travel. Much of it, admittedly, was little more than journalism enjoying an unusual freedom of length.

So elastic was the form that anything seemed open to examination and exploration; Asia, Africa and a place once; answering to the name of Eastern Europe were exhaustively traversed and written about. Everyone - everyone being a staunch corps of Granta regulars - seemed to be writing and travelling, and boundaries were blurring. Yet despite all the activity, the many books, and the list of converts to the free flowing genre, few travel classics actually emerged.

For all the claims made by the British, who had dominated the 19th century traveller's accounts of exploration and discovery - and certainly the 19th century explorer was the father of the 20th century travel writer - and considering the continued British domination of 20th century travel writing, American novelist/ travel writers Paul Theroux and, in a less classifiable way, Peter Matthiessen, have produced the most exciting works in the genre, such as Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) and The Old Patogonian Express (1979) and Matthiessen's mythic odyssey, The Snow Leopard (1978).

Interestingly, one of the best travel books of the past 20 years does not explore the exotic, and visits neither jungles nor deserts. Instead it wanders through the American heartland at its most ordinary and most domestic. Jonathan Raban's Old Glory (1981) was born of his boyhood fascination with the Mississippi. Having first read Huckleberry Finn as a boy of seven, Raban, an Englishman raised in Norfolk and an informed, curious writer blessed with a naturally graceful prose style, finally achieved his dream and sailed down the Mississippi in a 16 foot boat. Humour and pathos share the honours in this sharp, brilliantly observant narrative. It is an account of an Englishman abroad but without the usual cliches. Raban's interest in America is neither condescending nor romantic. He is alert to the zany, but does not stoop to ridicule. Old Glory is an accurate portrait of the real America, not the tourist version.

All of this explains why Raban's Bad Land, a study of the short lived homesteading experiment attempted in Eastern Montana in the early years of this century, should promise so much - and deliver, brilliantly. As a story it reflects the best and worst aspects of the American Dream. By 1908, the Great Northern railroad had reached Montana on its way west from Chicago to the Pacific coast. The railway company knew that the only way to make the vent tire pay was to attract people to live in this vast, unpopulated prairie. The Great American Desert was packaged to potential settlers in glamorised travel brochures.

Like many people in our own time who long to abandon urban living in search, of something better, many of those in the developing big cities at the beginning of the century were interested in settling in the west. This was not the Wild West - it was farming country, with a regular train service and electric light. The settlers were after personal renewal, not adventure. Along with these Americans, however, were the desperate poor of Europe. Late in Raban's thoughtful, powerful book, he acknowledges how for disappointed settlers "Eastern Montana, with its ruins and fading paths, had come to resemble all the sad places in Europe" they had left.

Despite the physical descriptions and Raban's awareness of the size of the area, Bad Land is an engaging, informative and imaginative social history. Central to this account of emigration and settlement is a specific theme, that of finding one's place. Raban, though not an oppressively egocentric writer, does write about himself and in this book admits to "trying to find my own place in the landscape and history of the West". So the book is both personal quest Raban having settled in America - and an investigation into what happened to a settlement that thrived, then collapsed.

The most obvious factor in this decline was the harsh Montana climate. "When rain falls in these parts, in what used to be known as the Great American Desert, it falls with the weight of an astounding gift. It falls like money" an echo there of The Great Gatsby. The Montana settlement is an American tragedy: "For every working homestead, there was a deserted house."

Raban tells his story through a clever blend of fact, his own observations and those of earlier travellers, and plausible historical reconstruction. He shows us what the new arrivals, who "found themselves in country that defeated the best efforts of the eye to get it in sharp focus", encountered a land which "went on interminably in every direction". It was not quite raw land, we are told, but neither was it a landscape.

We also experience Montana's story through an unpublished family memoir written by Percy Wollaston, the son of a homesteader. Percy's grown son remembers his father telling him of an abiding memory of his mother on her knees daily, "crying and praying for rain". Raban discusses the work of Evelyn Cameron, an Englishwoman who began photographing Montana in 1894. The search for polo ponies for the British market had brought her to America, but she stayed to capture the ambiguity of Montana in pioneering photography. Raban makes the point that it was easier to paint the sea than the plains. "Even the sky - the big subject of the flat country landscapist - was a vacant blue... There was no Constable or Corot to give shape and meaning to rural life in this part of the West." Raban discovers that it is not an easy landscape to photograph, either: his own efforts, he says, are like images of badly maintained golf courses.

"So what's this book you're writing?" Raban is asked, "Montana," he answers. "Homesteads. Deserted houses. The empty prairie. Dry farming. You know." But it is about even more than its big subject. Bad Land is about America, about history, about life, about dreams and despair. This is a thinking, living book by an interesting, honest and original writer.