Fishing in Utopia:Sweden and the Future that Disappeared by Andrew Brown

I've thought about moving to Sweden several times since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, but since I can't speak the language and learning it wasn't going to happen for me, the idea has remained a wistful fantasy.
There was a Swedish librarian working in Nyeri , Kenya as part of an aid programme, when I was teaching at a rural school nearby in the fateful year of 1979.That was the beginning of the long arc of the ascendancy of neo-liberalism in politics and economics which for a brief moment of naivety I thought might have ended in 1997 with the return of a Labour government but only finally crashed to the ground last year with the near-collapse of the global financial system. The Swedish librarian in Nyeri was fully-funded by her government on a Swedish salary and pension whilst my colleagues and other European and American aid workers we knew in the area were either church-sponsored or in volunteer schemes like Peace Corps, where the rewards were more of an intrinsic nature. Our Swedish friend was in a different league of serious and professional development aid, and for me her presence confirmed the superiority of Sweden's altruistic commitment to world development by comparison with the lacklustre and ultimately self-interested efforts of the British government.

I've never managed to visit Sweden. An Anglican vicar with three children has other spending priorities, and the high prices were a serious deterrent. In 1990 I was drawn sufficiently strongly by the attraction of Scandinavia in general however to acquiesce willing to family clamour to holiday in Denmark which was quite local as were living in Essex at the time. Legoland was the lure for the children's sake -this was before it appeared in Windsor - and cruising on Scandinavian Seaways overnight was the highlight for us the parents. It offered a far better experience than a cross-channel ferry in terms of the facilities for children and not least important the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet of fish, cheeses, egg and cold meats and fresh bread in several varieties of grain. Our first visit was for four nights only, two of them afloat, staying on a Danish farm, eating with the other guests and our hosts around the family table. For all it's brevity it was a truly refreshing holiday and when we returned home we felt like we'd been away for some weeks rather than an extended weekend. On our second visit to Scandinavia - though Denmark again - a year or two later, driving a Swedish Volvo by this time, we hired bicycles and rode up one of the long flat Danish versions of a fjord to see the remains of a Viking burial mound. Scandinavian street furniture with its quality and safety conscious design;and the welcome given to children in cafes and restaurants children re-confirmed our appreciation of the superiority of the social and political culture in Scandinavia. It exposed for us the poverty of the public squalor/private wealth culture that had grown up in Thatcher's Britain and blighted our years of having and raising young children on a limited income, as with each succeeding Thatcher-led government another mainstay of welfare security was removed.
So it was with immediate interest that I landed on Andrew Brown's new book when I spotted it on display in Blackwell at Oxford. Here is an Englishman who actually did move to Sweden, learned the language and lived there as if that was to be his life's future, marrying a Swedish woman and having a child there. But disillusioned both with his family life and with the country as its flaws became more evident and it too began to succumb to the over-whelming force of neo-liberal dogma, Brown left for home, divorced his wife, and developed a career as a journalist and writer. The book recounts also his return journeys to Sweden in more recent years and his rediscovery of a country he never really stopped loving.

It is also a book about fishing. Brown is passionate about this. This is the main drawback of the book for me. If you are interested in fishing there's probably too much about Swedish politics in it for you, and vice versa. It is steeped in melancholy. Feelings of loss are strongly conveyed, from the subtitle onwards. But it is a compelling and lyrical book, well worth reading.