Blood Knots - a great book

Welded, as I have been, to my keyboard, and more or less completely immersed in my own world of describing water with words, I took a while to bump into a book that has been well reviewed more or less everywhere and was just these last few days a Book of the Week on Radio 4.

Less than a fortnight ago I saw mention somewhere of Blood Knots, a newly published book written by Luke Jennings. It seemed Blood Knots was about fish and rivers - only to be about something else entirely - in a way I really liked the sound of. I googled the title and found online a long excerpt as printed in The Observer - for whom Luke writes about ballet and dance, it turns out. Even though I should have been doing something else - writing - I started to read Luke's words and kept on reading them all the way to the end. This was easy: they carried me along weightlessly, so to speak, as all the best writing should. So I dropped him a line - amazing how you can do this kind of thing by the miracle of Google - and said I'd so enjoyed what I'd read that I'd like to review the rest, if I could, for a magazine and this blog. Luke sent me a copy and I have just finished it.

Blood Knots is a fishing memoir, up to a point. It describes a boyhood and lifelong passion catalysed by the spectral glimpse of an eel seen below his rowing boat on the last day before Luke was sent to boarding school. He was afloat with his parents and brother. Something, he writes, irrecoverable was ending. In the midst of that loss the eel promised him another world - What Aztec empires might that darkness hold? What escape might it represent? It is darkness that Luke casts into in the opening chapter on a canal in north London, that he returns to at the end. And from that darkness his story is pulled. As something had ended so another had begun.

At first the Aztec empire held only water: he caught very little (how familiar is that?) but Tom - a kindly gardener changed that one summer on an estate lake near where his family was staying. Later, in his final year at prep-school Luke befriended an older boy who was teaching there in his gap year: Robert Nairac had a shot-gun, a hawk and a Hardy fishing rod. He was cool, as one of Luke's friends admits. But there is something ineffable about Robert too: a quality that shines but is also foreboding. Luke talks later in the book about the dimensionality of time and there is something in Robert that makes him the embodiment of that idea, his predestination carved into his soul. He shares this quality with Norman Maclean's brother from the memoir novella A River Runs Through It, and like Maclean's brother, Robert is murdered. Not by bootleggers and gamblers, but by the IRA. A bungled, messy, amateur hit-job.

As the cover hints, this book is as much about friendship and kinship, their meaning and loss, as it is about fishing. It is about the nature of bravery - of Luke's father who was a tank commander in WW2 and suffered terrible injuries, as well as of Robert who was working undercover in a theatre of The Troubles that few others would ever dared enter.

But Blood Knots is about literary bravery too, not only because of the breadth of the book, the structure - which is brilliantly carried off -  and the fact that Luke has defied the easy conventions when writing about the natural world, but mostly because Luke treats these profound subjects with a restraint that - as writing should but often doesn't dare - lets the reader in, makes you feel it but never tells you what you should be feeling.

Blood Knots is a classic. Beautifully written, stark, moving. It is also very funny. And the descriptions of rivers, fish and fishing are worth the ticket price alone. I found so much in it that I understood, that I recognised, but it took Blood Knots to put into words. Only the best books give you that.

Atlantic Books £16.99