Illuminated by Water: Fly Fishing and the Allure of the Natural World

Writer and singer Tallack (Sixty Degrees North) dives into his decades of fly-fishing in this incandescent work about the restorative power of nature. “For me, the desire to catch fish is the opposite of simple,” Tallack writes, “and at its root is not an eagerness to kill or to capture at all... [but] a quite different instinct: an intense, focused curiosity.” Employing that intense curiosity here, he blends his personal history with a cultural investigation of fly-fishing, and, more specifically, its ability to lure people in. As he wades from 1980s East Sussex, where his “fixation” with fishing began, to the trout-filled waters he fished until his thirties in Shetland, he offers philosophical musings on the “flow state” induced by angling—a “combination of repetitive, purposeful movement... and a focused, optimistic mindset” that’s been known to reduce depression—and reminisces in lyrical prose on his many voyages, including trips to the River Devon’s “rushing waterfalls and... wide, languorous stretches.” Later chapters evoke the ambient threat of climate change and industrial pollution, noting, among other things, how Britain’s once-fecund chalk streams are being “choked [of] life” due to massive amounts of untreated sewage discharged from local water companies. Never didactic or sentimental, his prose winds its way through inner and outer terrains, rendering sparkling meditations at every turn. This casts the life aquatic in a wondrous light. (July)