Brian Clarke’s Pursuit of Stillwater Trout. Red and white plastic floats for perch fishing. A solid fibreglass rod about five feet long, in mineral green with white streaks, its brass-wire rodrings lashed on with lumpy twine.
Perhaps surprisingly, these are not the latest MPs’ expenses claims to be revealed by the Daily Telegraph. Nor are they the latest solution to this apparent collapse in civilisation brought about by duck islands and digestive biscuits, democracy crumbling as helipad hedges are trimmed and moribund mortgages flipped.
But these simple items are deeply political: they all appear in the first chapter of this year’s Orwell Prize-winning book, Andrew Brown’s Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future That Disappeared.
This might leave you reeling – a book about fishing winning Britain’s leading prize for political writing? What’s political about fishing – apart from the odd Cod War? Fish can’t have spawned many political books, surely?
Casting one’s mind back does bring one book to the surface. It’s a novel from 1939 about a hen-pecked suburb-dwelling middle-aged insurance salesman who decides to escape back to his home town, Lower Binfield, and in particular, the pond at the back of Binfield House. It’s a novel where the idea of fishing once more at this childhood haunt holds quite an attraction: ‘if you gave me the choice of having any woman you care to name, but I mean any woman, or catching a ten-pound carp, the carp would win every time’. It’s a novel where, of course, this love goes unrequited: industrialisation, development, modern capitalism and the impending onset of war destroy his halcyonic vision as surely as sprawling residential waste has destroyed his pond.
It’s a novel called Coming Up for Air by one George Orwell.
Orwell was never afraid to challenge people’s preconceptions of what ‘politics’ was, where it resides and how accessible it should be – and nor is the Orwell Prize. Awarded since 1994 to the works which come closest to his ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’, we don’t want to be just another literary prize, backslapping the great and the good at glitterati parties. We want to spark debate, make people think, and take politics to the public in interesting and unexpected ways. (Take a look at the Orwell Diaries for instance, or the debates on our You Tube channel, including this now infamous clip.
It’s why we awarded a prize for political blogs (in addition to books and journalism) for the first time this year, won by a pseudonymous policeman. It’s why our recent winners have ranged from respected political historians interrogating the past to Palestinian lawyers wanting to take a walk, from correspondents covering events in Iraq and Africa to distinguished academic columnists.
And it’s why we’re thrilled to be at the Buxton Festival for the first time this year, organising two events on the 17th July. In the morning, former winner Matthew Parris chairs a discussion about ‘what makes a good political novel?’ Novelists Chris Cleave (Incendiary, The Other Hand), Delia Jarrett-Macauley (Moses, Citizen and Me, winner of the Orwell Prize 2006) and Marina Lewycka (A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Two Caravans and the forthcoming We Are All Made of Glue) and literary editor of The Observer, Robert McCrum, will be taking part.
And in the afternoon, Andrew Brown will be discussing his book – fishing and all – with David Blunkett MP, former Home Secretary and Labour MP for Sheffield Brightside.
Why not catch us there?
Gavin Freeguard
Administrator of the Orwell Prize
