The Stream - Hardcover

Clarke, Brian

3.49

37 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1585675288 ISBN 13: 9781585675289

Publisher: The Overlook Press, 2004

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Winner of the Author's Club Best First Novel Award as well as the first novel to ever win Britain's premier literary environmental award--the BP Natural World Book Prize, known as the "Green Booker"--Brian Clarke's The Stream is a finely drawn portrait of a small cross-section of the environment experiencing the conflict between development and conservation. Apart from a few protesters, the announcement of an industrial park in a depressed rural area is widely welcomed. It promises new jobs and new hope for those who live there. A few miles away, in a small valley with a stream running through it, ownership of a farm passes from father to son. Over time, these two events take their toll. The pressures are felt most powerfully in the stream itself as, little by little, the creatures that live in it are sucked into a mute and unseen struggle for survival. With grace and objectivity, and with a narrative rhythm echoing the patterns of nature, The Stream records the consequences of environmental degradation from the inside. As The Times (London) wrote, this is "a devastatingly effective novel which ought to be required reading for schoolchildren, government ministers, businessmen, environmentalists, and anyone else who has an interest in the environment."

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About the Author:

Brian Clarke writes for 'The Times' on fish, fishing and the aquatic environment and has been the subject of a major BBC film for his work on trout behaviour. He is also a travel writer, and specialises in wildlife and wilderness subjects. He has published several non-fiction books, most recently 'Trout etcetera', a collection of his journalism and essays. The double-award winning 'The Stream' is his first novel. Brian Clarke lives in Hampshire.

From Publishers Weekly:

The creatures of a pristine valley stream struggle against the changes wrought by the construction of an industrial park in Clarke's debut novel, which documents the deterioration of a rural ecosystem in poignant detail. After a ponderous opening that describes the forces of nature in wooden prose, Clarke hits his stride as he interweaves the story of the stream's denizens with the story of the machinations behind, and protests against, the park's development. The human characters are forgettable stereotypes, ranging from a corporate activist trying to save the stream to the various executives of Cogent Electronics, the British firm underwriting the industrial project. But the dilemma of the various animals and insects is described in loving, painstaking detail, as Clarke chronicles the demise of the local trout and salmon, then works his way down to the plight faced by mayflies as their environment is overrun with chokeweed and silt. As a work of fiction, Clarke's book is deeply flawed: the animal passages are repetitious, and the human characters severely underdeveloped. But as a naturalistic treatise, this narrative works because it brings home the interdependence of the various animals and their helplessness as their world is altered and they are destroyed. The novelistic blemishes may put off mainstream readers, but the book should find admirers among fans of environmental fiction.
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