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Today, [Van Morrison] is renowned as a grouch who releases banal jazz-lite albums. Of course, it wasn't always this way. His second solo album, [Astral Weeks], is considered by many to be the greatest of all time. It's certainly one of the most enigmatic and mystical.

ORIGINALLY released in 1968, [VAN MORRISON]'s [ASTRAL WEEKS] has been named regularly in greatest albums of all time lists - number 19 in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums. It was an album full of laid-back jazz-based music which reflected the hippie sounds in vogue.

A first performance ever of [Van Morrison]'s \"landmark\" album from 1968, 'Astral Weeks', a record notable for its looseness and spontaneity, and for its sense of its time.

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.''