British writer takes us to angler’s quiet world

“How to Fish” (Overlook Press: 256 pp., $19.95) by Chris Yates

A part of me wants to thank Chris Yates for his book, and another part wants to punch him in the mouth.

The irritated part finds summer to be no slower than the spring: hectic with deadlines and paperwork, far from the streams where Yates sits quietly, waiting for fish to rise. My irritation’s not his fault, I admit. There is nothing boastful about “How to Fish.”

In this book, Yates turns his pursuit of salmon, loach, bullhead and other fish into a beautiful meditation on existence that would make Thoreau or — more aptly, since Yates is an Englishman — Izaak Walton proud.

My grateful side considers “How to Fish” a relief, a window onto something that many of us, increasingly, find only in books — the quiet, contemplative experience of the religious hermit that the angler clearly shares.

The chapters follow Yates through the seasons in prose that ripples like the clear streams where he spends his days. He captures the wonder, and humor, of the natural world: “The greatest Piscean jump I ever saw was achieved by a sea trout who, in its attempt to hurdle a weir, javelined itself about fifteen feet through the air and hit a friend of mine, who was fishing on the weir sill.” Or else he describes absurd moments, like the time he hooked a fish and it raced ahead of him for miles, forcing him to follow the unspooled line — like Theseus following the thread out of the Labyrinth — down paths, across a bridge, into unfamiliar places, until finally he found his exhausted prize in a reed bed along the stream’s bank.

His exhilaration is infectious; the patient understanding of the angler that he’s developed over several decades seems clearly applicable to our 9-to-5 grind. “What’s interesting,” he says near the book’s end, “is that, though anglers are rarely surprised by a totally grim day, we nearly always maintain our optimism. We understand pessimism because our dreams are sometimes dented by the blows of fate, but always our hope returns, like a primrose after a hard winter.”