Outdoorsy writing has been around since Gilbert White published his letters on Selbourne, and probably long before. His work helped inspire other naturalists like the Victorian, WH Hudson, and more recently, White’s biographer Richard Mabey, to write books on natural history. WH Hudson’s books inclined more towards travelogue and detailed observations of wildlife and landscape, whereas those by contemporary writers have been more about personal journeys and quests for inner discovery. Authors like Olivia Laing, Robert Macfarlane and Roger Deacon have all contributed to this genre of outdoors writing.
The outdoors theme has become popular enough for its own website to be created. Caught by the River has been going for nearly 12 years and features art, poetry, photography, some music, and a lot of outdoors writing. To the angler this should be quite appealing, especially as a few fishermen have contributed. We spend a lot of time outdoors and take an interest in the wildlife around water. The drawback with CBTR and the outdoorsy books is captured in the website’s description of itself as ‘stepping out of daily routines to re-engage with nature’, creating ‘perfect symbiotic harmony’ in a world ‘full of endless discovery’.
None of these phrases really means anything. They come from the language of the ‘new-age’, the stuff the flower children were saying over fifty years ago. Many of us feel sympathy towards the idea of escape from the concrete world in which most of us spend our working days, especially anglers who’ve read the peregrinations of BB, as much wanderer through nature as fisherman. The question is whether we really can escape from the JG Ballard scape of tarmac and tall buildings to a Wordsworthian idyll by immersing ourselves in pages of rural metaphors.
Nevertheless, sales are good for some of the writers. Macfarlane’s are particularly popular. Reading several other examples it becomes clear that filling a book’s worth of pages on the subject is not easy. There is only so much description possible for a walk through the country and many discursions are required to keep the narrative going. Laing’s To the River, a journey along the Sussex Ouse, draws on a favourite author, Virginia Woolf, to add backbone, to the extent that she tends to adopt Woolf’s ‘cocoons of language’ to spin out the landscape description. Mabey in Nature Cure does something similar and I’ve never quite managed to finish the book, frequently bogged down in exhaustive detail of wildlife (he wrote Flora Britannica so is well qualified on that aspect). Similarly Macfarlane’s travels never seem to go anywhere beyond elaboration of his surroundings and numerous references to other authors, easily parodied. Roger Deacon’s Waterlog is the most interesting of the bunch yet sits on my bookshelf unfinished. He does, however, have more to say than the other outdoors books I’ve read; his reflections on the effective privatisation of the Test and Itchen will be of interest to fly fishermen. Even so, the subject of swimming in the streams of England has not held my attention beyond the first few chapters.
CBTR also suffers from these shortcomings in my view. The poetry tends to be of the poetry school variety, formal and technical, rather cold. The prose often gives that feeling of an author working hard to put some texture into the writing, which ends up overcooked and lacking in substance. Some contributions are better than others but much of it makes CBTR seem like an outlet for the unpublishable. Meandering and staring into the distance, they never really seem to find their subject.
The Secret Angler 