British novelist and drama critic Luke Jennings's lovely and sensitive memoir, Blood Knots, opens at King's Cross, the train station made famous in the Harry Potter books as the home of the Hogwarts Express. A canal nearby is a popular spot to fish for pike. But Jennings moves a bit further down to try another spot, one of the many inland canals and rivers in London frequented by fly fishermen--in this case, a "morbid geography" with "dark water, its surface the faint sodium orange of the sky."
Jennings has been fishing ever since his dad bought him his first rod and reel. His father was severely burned in a tank battle and was a member of the Guinea Pig Club, which pioneered new plastic surgery treatments. Although his dad didn't fish, he encouraged his son every chance he got. It was Jennings's good friend Robert Nairac, from their school, Ampleforth, who ably instructed him in angling and falconry. An intelligence officer in the army, Nairac was captured in 1977 by the IRA in Northern Ireland and executed. These two heroes quietly guide Jennings in his life and in his love for fishing where, in those quiet moments, "the line begins, inch by inch, to tick from my hand. Deep down, something is moving, and I know that this is the moment, this is why we do it."
As Tom McGuane writes in his marvelous foreword, Blood Knots is a "great book" with "sharp portraiture" and "astute comments on angling literature, and elegant, dry humor." Cracking good. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher