Artificial
Rick Keam makes sense of
Greg French’s new book.
Greg French’s Frog Call (2002) unexpectedly broke through to a significant non-angling readership. People with no interest in fly fishing, ranging from the merely ambivalent to the potentially hostile, were at least temporarily charmed and disarmed by his writing.
This was no mean feat. It was achiev-ed because people respond to passion. As one character in Artificial observes, this potentially includes the irrational passions of extremists. French—a self-described ‘leftie bleeding-heart fly fisher’ —is no such extremist, but he spills over with passion for the things he loves. And hates. His anti-bureaucracy strikes a deep chord in the Australian psyche—perhaps quietly including the psyches of a few bureaucrats themselves, trapped (like most people most of the time) in dispassionate work circumstances not of their own making.
Artificial is similarly structured to Frog Call, and fuelled by the same concerns. Whether it will achieve the same crossover market success remains to be seen: this time the title and dustjacket synopsis may have less immediate appeal to a general audience. So may the omission of the few little simple illustrations that, in the earlier book, helped break the visual monotony of text alone.
French has evolved a way of story-telling that seems on the surface to be just a series of subheaded anecdotes of varying length, some of them very short indeed: there are no numbered, actual ‘chapters’ as such. Many readers will be happy to stay at this level and enjoy it all thoroughly. But I am reminded of the book’s description of an angler who has discovered that a lake is a living and changing thing, to be read horizontally and vertically in terms of its currents and strata. Underneath the surface of Artificial are deep unfolding themes of place and identity and how things are related to each other.
Sometimes this is pushed to its limits. A mind that in the space of one page can encompass fart-lighting kits, aboriginality and Sinéad O’Connor’s moving rendition of the traditional ballad ‘Lord Franklin’ is either supremely chaotic or supremely well-integrated. Definitely not the typical mind of your run-of-the-mill fly fishing writer, anyway. It is, to say the least, a far cry from classics of an earlier generation such as Fly-fisher in Tasmania. Just, er, different…
Whilst Tasmania remains central to the book’s concerns, it also ranges through different geographic slices in the lives of the author and his friends, taking in Chile, Japan and Canada. The interwoven supporting cast of disreputables, ratbags and relatively more-or-less normals include the now-familiar Lester and new (to us) identities such as Calvin and Beatrice, Budgie and Lai, Mark and Sakura, Magenta and Zongo. Their stories range from hilariously Rabelaisian to immensely moving, or both.
French maintains that it is in fact his mate Lester who acts as a magnet for weirdos (‘Bag ladies, paranoid schizophrenics, Liberal Party voters, conspiracy theorists, IT freaks, spin fishermen, Labor Party voters, you name it…’) but that: ‘In Lester’s company you realise that all these people are good people, genuinely good people. My difficulty is in remembering that, when Lester isn’t around to remind me.’
On the purely fishing side, French again canvasses issues of irrational response to angling pressure and to the management of ‘wilderness’, both locally and in Canada and New Zealand. Academics who structure courses in ‘wilderness values’ and Park management would do well to allow input from dissenting voices such as this one, coming as it does from a veteran of Tasmania’s historic Franklin blockades. It is during the formative learning stage of their careers that environmental managers most need exposure to alternative social perspectives, and encouragement to question assumed values.
As with Frog Call, Artificial provides a helpful glossary of fly fishing terms for the benefit of non-fly fishers. Unlike too many recent Australian fly fishing publications it has also been well proof-read, though being of part-Scottish descent I object strenuously to the appalling error of rendering Laphroaig Scotch whisky as ‘Lefroy Irish whiskey’.
Stylistically, French has achieved what is so elusive for any writer: a distinctive, instantly-recognisable voice in a distinctive idiom. He carries you passionately along with him on his journey—and his friends’ journeys—until, in the end, the reason for the book’s title suddenly becomes clear. More power to his pen.
To coincide with the launch of Artificial, publishers New Holland have also reprinted Frog Call. Both books, including an exclusive hardcover edition of Artificial can be ordered from the FlyLife website. www.flylife.com.au