Customer Reviews

River Music: A Fly Fisher's Four Seasons

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Two years ago Jim Babb published a collection of fishing essays in a book called Crosscurrents. I enjoyed that book more than any book I'd read on fly-fishing in some while. When I get Gray's through the door, the magazine Babb edits - a kind of US version of The Field in camouflage with adverts for bigger utility vehicles - I always turn first to his fishing essay. Babb elevates the ordinary and makes accessible the far-fetched. He can get inside your head and say something to which you'll think "oh yeah, that's right, that's how I see it" - only Babb expresses it for you.
In River Music you will find essays on Riverside cuisine and theories on social grouping according to whether you drink beer or spirits when camped by a river. There's also an exploration of a mid-life crisis played out while fishing and a brilliant story of ice-fishing.
The theme that links it all is the heritage of a musical father, Babb's tinnitus that sounds like a river in symphony and accompanies him wherever he goes, and the endless and soothing music that rivers make. This is a good book and I recommend you read it.
Charles Rangeley-Wilson

There's a peculiar style of writing that often attaches itself to fly fishing narratives, why I'm not sure. This literary form revels in its own complexity, challenges the reader, and coaxes the English language to do things that seemingly never were intended. Ted Leeson is a workmanlike practitioner of this style; James Babb is its master.

What is it? I'll call it grandiloquent piscatorial musing.

Three key elements of this genre of fish book are the use of esoteric vocabulary, outrageous similes, and long and complex sentences. Let's take a look at each, with references from River Music.

Here's an example of off the beaten path vocab -

"And then I had a piece of tarte au sucre - sugar pie, a thrombotic Gaspesian concoction of eggs and cream and butter and caramelized brown sugar quivering lasciviously in a crisp buttery shell".

What does thrombotic mean? Grab that dictionary and look it up.

How about this for a simile that makes your hair stand on end?

"Then came a day when sun in the east floodlit the soggy black behinds of clouds fleeing toward the west - the weary remnants of the storm that after a week of hanging just off the coast had finally come ashore in the night howling like a Shop - Vac swallowing a cat, fire hosing the hotel with hard edged raw ocean, and sending coconuts and lawn chairs flying around like soccer balls".

Yikes! A Shop - Vac swallowing a cat!

And here is a typically long sentence - not a run on sentence, mind you, but a suitably long and complex one to make clear that we won't be impaling a worm on a hook below a red and white bobber any time soon:

"Still, an electric aura seemed to crackle around us, particularly on those days when the plaid-jacketed, white-belted old gent in the adjoining music store would sit down to fiddle with his Wurlitzer and we, partly as therapy for the customer-free tedium and the jerkily painful polkas, and partly as permission to almost innocently touch, broke into a pre-disco-crisis dance called The Bump - a rhythmic riot of colliding rumps and red-faced laughter that sent the clock spinning quickly toward quitting time".

Do you think you'll enjoy reading this stuff?

I did...

Honestly, I expected Babb's writing to go by the way of so many other fly fishing books . Maybe something on the 3-4 star scale, and a little dry to my tastes. I was pleasantly surprised. Babb is as witty as he is seasoned in the sport. He's friendly and unassuming. He caught me off guard and gave reason to smile in nearly every vignette. A good laugh wasn't out of the question.
I'll be picking up his other titles.

Babb is an exceptional writer who really hits a home run with this book. I have bought 2 more copies to give to my fishing buddy, who is a retired college enlish professor, and my oldest son, who has the same fly fishing passion that I do. If you like to read a well written and humorous account of some of his fishing experiences, this is the book. His writing is so good it could be about anything and you would enjoy reading his book. For those of us who fly fish, it was even better, since we had experienced some of the same feelings but don't know how to express them nearly as well as the Author. A don't miss book!!