BOOK REVIEW: Against the Flow By Tom Fort, Century, £14.99
As the might of the USSR crumbled and the Iron Curtain began to rust, Tom Fort was climbing into a battered Peugeot with his fishing rods stashed in the boot to take a ferry into Europe and cross into the forbidding east. A subeditor at the BBC, he had little knowledge of what lay in store, but was convinced it was an experience worth grabbing with both hands.
Twenty years later, he retraces his steps to see what has changed, using the common language of, eh, fishing to cross borders that ideology and language have foundered upon.
Fort is pleasant company, and he has a crisp writing style that manages to convey the enormous changes he is witnessing. Like many of the characters he meets, there is a hankering over lost traditions and an all-pervasive nostalgia.
In Romania, he is repeatedly told that the fishing was much better during the Ceausescu period by a young man who was all of two when the dictator met his maker. Fort joins in, and keens for the lost shabbiness of the Cracow of old, for example, now replaced by a thriving town packed with – the horror – tourists.
What is striking, though, is how many of the waterways and pools that Fort had the pleasure of fishing decades before have been destroyed by development and industry. Gin-clear water has been turned soapy and murky; fish are few and far between on stretches that were previously dense with activity. It is disheartening, for both author and reader.
Fort is an honest depicter of events and people; he has a good eye for minor foibles that can speak volumes, and is unsparing in deploying them. He records grammatical slips accurately, which seems a little harsh, but they do add to the otherness of the various regions in which he finds himself up to his knees in water. It is a meandering journey worth spending some time on.