The other day a friend asked me what a lascar was. Fair enough: it’s not a word you come across in everyday conversation. Perhaps he’d been reading Spike Milligan, where I last met it. A similar question struck me about the ‘unreasonable virtue’ which the American writer Mark Kurlansky sees in fly fishing. I have fished all my life and am no more or less virtuous that the next man. I searched for the answer in this book but failed to find it.
It is hard to understand why it was published. True, British writing about fly fishing has become a lackadaisical, threadbare thing. Monthly magazines are full of accounts of riverbank expeditions which end in a tussle, the angler’s rod ‘bucking like a bronco’, and eventually with a ‘bar of silver’ lying on the riverbank. Read one and you’ve read them all. American writers, such as Thomas McGuane, tend to try a bit harder.
Ah, but the covers of this book! They’re the thing — replete with a Hong Kong watercolourist’s homage to one of those big Victorian salmon flies.
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