What first struck me when I heard about Marina Gibson’s book, Cast Catch Release (published 2024) is that its publisher is Hodder Press, part of Hatchette; and in the US, Simon & Schuster, which also publishes John Gierach. These are big players in publishing, so not usually associated with the minor field of fishing books. The only way you get to publish with them is by persuading a literary agent to take you on. Literary agents are generally not interested in fishing book authors except in rare cases. This is because an angling book is unlikely to make money; in the mainstream publishing world money is what it’s all about. Forget about quality, count the projected sales. And what sells books? Profile. This is why you get novels by TV gardeners, quiz show presenters, models and all the rest of the celebrity milieu who fancy themselves as writers.
Gibson’s book is reviewed as a fishing book so one presumes that’s what it is. Reading the reviews, which are favourable like all fishing book reviews, it becomes clear that the book is also an autobiography about her ‘journey’ to becoming a professional fisherman (fisherwoman), or according to the dust jacket, a ‘search for peace and purpose by the water’. Early thirties seem a bit soon in life to be writing biography but perhaps her experience is rich enough to justify one. Worth a read maybe, so I borrowed a copy — I have too many books as it is to take a punt on this one.
To address the question of publisher first. The author has no publishing record so her profile is what counts. She took up fishing again in her early twenties and started posting photos on Instagram, the social media site for happy snappers and self-promoters. According to the book, this led to an invitation from Orvis to be an ambassador (paid ad-woman). Later Gibson complains about drawing resentment from other anglers because she’s ‘young, blond and female’, and of course the inevitable abuse from the chauvinists, anoraked incels and all the other cultural sawdust lying around the internet. I’ve written about these characters at some length; it’s one of the most unpleasant online hazards which those who run these sites do far too little to stop.
Yet there is obviously an advantage to being a photogenic young woman. The number of anglers is falling. More women fishing helps tackle companies to maintain or preferably increase sales and a female ambassador is one way to encourage them. And, like it or not, in the land of advertising, young blond women attract far more attention than middle-aged, balding men. Call it the totty factor.
So Gibson’s gender and looks certainly helped hook the Orvis gig and, coupled with her subsequent hard work building a fishing school, led on to appearances on television and the radio, the Jeremy Vine show and Woman’s Hour. At some point she was picked up by the PFD agency. Her profile now well and truly raised, they suggested she write a book on her experiences, which they placed with a top publisher, presumably without much difficulty.
With Hodder’s marketing reach and radio and TV publicity, a reasonable level of sales is therefore almost guaranteed. What of the book itself? Reading the bumph I wondered how much is about fishing. Well it turns out to be a mix of autobiography, fishing and lifecycle of the Atlantic salmon. The biographical material covers her romantic troubles alphabetically, first in New Zealand with ‘A’, then in Yorkshire with ‘B’ (I’m guessing they’re not actually Arnie and Barry or similar). All this is readable stuff; the prose is competent if a little workmanlike. Whether these experiences coupled with an early career drift are interesting enough for biography will depend on the reader. My view is such experiences are common to a great many.
The fishing sections tend to be about exotic locations and fish, travel to the Seychelles, Argentina and other faraway seas and rivers. These are fairly brief interludes in the narrative but the author has done a lot of long-distance flying. Somewhere in the book she claims a ‘passion for conservation’, which slips easily off the tongue of many salmon anglers as populations decline. But of course this sits very badly with her appetite for travel; the growth in aviation contributes significantly to global heating, and warming seas are no good for salmon nor many other species of fish. You just cannot be both a conservationist and a frequent flyer.
From a structural view, the flow of the book is regularly interrupted by short discourses on the salmon’s life cycle. Gibson has mugged up on the subject and the passages are informative but fragment the narrative. They feel like page filler and I found myself skimming them. Overall it is not a bad book, despite some tired phrasing, the ‘bars of silver’ that swim into the parts on salmon fishing and the several ‘wake up calls’. In the final pages she turns to self-analysis, concluding that fishing teaches her that she can be ‘all the versions of myself, in all the places I long to be,’ which sounds a bit like having your cake and eating it and explains the travel lust. ‘You must continually try to improve your basic technique at the same time as embellishing it with new sophistications.’ I suppose a fishing instructor would think along those lines though personally I prefer to avoid too many sophistications: they lead to wind knots, flies snapped off and unsophisticated language. Perhaps I need to go back to school.
The end reveals whom the book is aimed at. Homely explanations of the attractions of fishing, the air of instruction — definitions of leader and backing, terms familiar to any fly fisherman — suggest this is not written with the committed angler in mind. The closing glossary provides definitions of reel, hook, cast, etc, of which even non-anglers would likely know the meaning. One senses the intervention of an editor here. The market lies with those readers who like to hear about the ‘personal journey’ of a woman beating the odds in a man’s world, not so much on the curious interest in catching wet slimy creatures. In that respect Gibson has done a decent job. She has made a name for herself in the fishing world. One could point out that she has the good fortune to come from a well-off family (who started her salmon fishing), possibly the source of funds for all those foreign trips, but none the less, it takes determination to make a living from fishing.
Catch Cast Release, then, is not really a book for anglers. ‘Human interest’ is the real subject and it’s dispiriting to be reminded that the few good books on just fishing sell so poorly. The author’s appearance on Woman’s Hour was a good marketing move because women are most likely those readers the publishers have in mind. Of course, Marina might say I only think that because I’m a man.
The Secret Angler 