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Still, he is not the first to have circumnavigated England, as he himself acknowledges in a charming section on his predecessors that begins: ''This notion of taking to a boat . . . is one that regularly presents itself to a certain dubious brand of Englishman, and I should have felt more disturbed than I was by the company I found myself keeping.'' He is not even the first to do it this decade, if you stretch the point and count the trip by land around Britain's coast that Paul Theroux recounted in ''The Kingdom by the Sea'' (1983). (The two travelers meet in ''Coasting,'' just as they did in Mr. Theroux's book. They offer each other heartfelt assurances that their respective books are proceeding disastrously.) So one has the right to expect something more than a travel book out of Mr. [Jonathan Raban]'s ''Coasting.'' Happily enough, one gets it. When his novel ''Foreign Land'' was published in 1985, Mr. Raban said in an interview that ''good travel books are novels at heart.'' The novel at the heart of ''Coasting'' is introduced in a passage where the author explains why ''the intimate connection'' between the two words ''pater'' and ''patria'' ''was one of the few things in Latin that I ever understood.'' Of course, nothing that Mr. Raban writes in ''Coasting'' is as heavy-handed or schematic as I've made it sound. He builds with minutely observed details and his narrative is always alive with crosscurrents of amusing ambiguity. When he stops on his eastward leg to pay a call on his parents, now retired from the parish over which his father once presided, he finds them living in the red-light district of Southampton. ''We like it,'' his mother assures him. ''It's got so much character, don't you think?'' Only that morning, she's been propositioned by a cruising motorist. ''I was rather bucked, actually,'' she says. ''He was extremely polite about it when I said no.''