THE STREAM

A British fishing and wilderness travel writer turns to fiction to deliver the bad news about what exactly happens when a small, rural stream and its environs undergo industrial development.

Clarke’s direct prose allows the reader to nest in an environment and witness its demise. The setting is a stream that flows through an old farm, ancient woodland, and an English settlement that can measure its years in millennia. Short chapters chronicle the stream’s fate month-by-month, alternating between the natural rhythms of the water and the effects on it of nearby industrial development that taps into the flow, a synchronicity that Clarke plays with to great effect. The area’s struggle for economic survival conflicts with the laws of continuity, the natural “law that governed all things,” as the author puts it. The stream environment’s needs, and those of the cob and the trout, the salmon and the willow and the mink, do not mesh with those of an electronics plant. Clarke’s knowledge of waterways—he possesses both the scientist’s eye and that of an affectionate familiar—brings readers into intimate association with the food chain supporting the glorious small streams that grace the countryside and give particular character to fast diminishing farmland. Questions of balance, heritage, and priorities are at stake, as well as the peaceable ether of a ramshackle farm. Clarke keeps his language as spare as a prose poem, emphasizing consequences that have a raw and inexorably troubled edge. He judges character by effect, and everyone falls short. As for the trout, the mayfly, the otter . . . wrong place, wrong time.

A prizewinning, magnetic first novel of rising, dignified passion, and a perspective-snapping breach to business as usual from an author who knows the beautiful cycle of stream life—and all that will be lost with its demise.