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Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared

The end of Eden

Andrew Brown
Granta, 352pp, £16.99,

Fraser Nelson

Wednesday, 27th August 2008

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

Sweden holds a powerful allure for British men, which I used to see for myself every Friday in a departure lounge of Heathrow airport. I was part of a group of weekend commuters who met for a beer, en route to see our girlfriends in Stockholm, in Terminal 3. Every so often one of our number would disappear, being swallowed up by this beautiful country for good. There would be no goodbye or explanations. It was taken for granted each one of us, sooner or later, would succumb.

But not Andrew Brown. After eight years as a Swede, where he not only dreamed in Swedish but learned to distinguish trees by the smell, his marriage collapsed and he returned to Britain. It got worse, as he kept returning to find his socialist paradise becoming more corrupted. His book, Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared, is a remarkable tour of the country, its people and their mindset.

Brown was made all the more vulnerable to Sweden by his love of fishing. The pike-filled lakes seduced him as much as the women or socialism. For him it was the perfect form of communion with his adopted country. His personal bait was a Swedish girl he met while working in a Welsh nursing home, and he decided to emigrate with her. He’d been thrown out of public school, for an annoyingly undisclosed offence, and decided to start again as a labourer in a timber factory in a town north of Gothenburg.

It was 1977 and he found there everything he thought socialism ought to be. He attended evening classes organised by the trade union, he read socialist newspapers and went on workers’ holidays. ‘Nothing on state-run television suggested the world might be different.’ This was his utopia, where everyone believed that ‘individuals, in some important sense, didn’t exist at all’.

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Andrew Brown

August 29th, 2008 3:40pm

I shouldn't quibble at such a generous and thoughtful review, but with that said -- quibble: I really didn't thnk, and don't, that Sweden was a socialist utopia or any other sort; and when I lived there, I loathed those aspects of the place and said and wrote so often. I don't believe that Utopia can be found anywhere, though if we're lucky we might fish some of the rivers that flow out of it.

Rupert

August 30th, 2008 8:48pm

Wasn't it James I and VI who said that he didn't know whether Purgatory existed, but as long it had a field for hawking and a stream for fishing, he didn't much mind?

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