Paperback: The Stream

Edward Marriott11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Forty years ago, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring revealed the environmental destruction being done in the name of progress. Now we have Brian Clarke's The Stream, already hailed by some as Carson's successor, but it is a very 21st century work: as much a hymn to the beauty of the natural world as it is elegiac and resigned about the onward march of concrete.

Clarke has written a novel centring on the life of a stream threatened by industrial development. In stripped, poetic prose he describes the lives and seasons of the trout, mayflies, otters, water caterpillars and nymphs that make it their home. Into this narrative he cuts the human story: the government lobbying, the environmental protesters, the neighbouring farmers choosing pesticides over traditional husbandry.

The last trout dies as the ribbon is cut. "The dome of the sky looked down at [the fish]. And the applause rang out."

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