Mark Williams reads Tom Fort’s travelogue, searching for fish and truths in Eastern Europe.
The Publisher says –
Twenty years ago, Tom Fort drove his littler red car onto the ferry at Felixstowe, heading east. The old order that had held eastern Europe in its grip for half a century had gone, and yet no-one knew what the new order would be. Politically, spiritually, economically, everything was changing at a speed people found hard to comprehend.
Tom Fort’s aim was to follow the rivers, to explore the remote places, to meet those who cherished them and find out how they were coming to terms with the disintegration of the system that had controlled their lives for so long. And – naturally enough – to fit in some fishing along the way.
The Author
Tom Fort went to Eton and read English at Oxford before becoming a local newspaper reporter. He joined the BBC and worked as a journalist there for more than 20 years.
The Reviewer says –
Two visits to the same areas of eastern Europe by Tom Fort who was, on the second trip, 20 years older himself, is a cautionary tale which has many parallels in the UK.
On his first trip, Communism was breaking apart and the splinters of the old Soviet Bloc looking forward to better times. They at last had freedom, but the penalty for joining the capitalist economic revolution was exacted in the crassness of the profit motive.
Fort’s writing is superb – often uplifting, always concise, interrogative and insightful. If you want to know more about the fishing that’s still available in Hungary, Poland, Romania and a clutch of other eastern European countries, here is a great starting point.
But Fort looks much more deeply into the waters than would a mere travel writer. Fort discovers that the fall of Communism didn’t end injustice, it merely introduced differences injustices, and rivers and streams suffered the same fate. The filth from badly-run factories was reduced massively, but exchanged for ruthless, unthinking schemes to make more money from land by diverting the natural chaos of meanders and flood meadows into canals.
This is an important book, and not only if you intend to visit eastern Europe’s remaining fishing. All of the ills which have befallen the region’s rivers are familiar to Britons, for our rivers have suffered a similar fate. The only saving grace has been some measure of angling control, for in eastern Europe, rivers are still recovering from the unfettered exploitation of fish stocks.
Against the Flow is simply a superb book about the connection between politics and people, fishing and the environment.
