Book Review: 'Manfishing' by Peter Pheasant

Manfishing is the first novel by retired Nottingham journalist Pete Pheasant. Pete explained to LeftLion that this book has been in development for the last 40 years. Following the publication of How A Mozzie Burnt My Bum two years ago, Pete brings us the biography of a journalism that emerged from the smoky newsrooms and off the cuff reporting of the last century. 

Manfishing is a book that hinges on the life of Simon Fox, a uniquely driven and wily writer for the Brexham Bugle. While The Bugle is an institution of the shrinking community, it’s also a relic becoming more consigned to the past with each strained issue. Its editors, even if once decent journalists, have become mere weathervanes for Brexham's prevailing winds. With Simon Fox as a central figure, it is through a journalist’s eye that we confront the small town. It is perhaps then no coincidence that the stories of this book are brought to us as distinct and unique stories in their own right. Our immersion into the community of Brexham is always felt as characters move in and out again of these intertwined experiences, becoming familiar but never static. As their fates reveal themselves, we feel the voices around them jostle and transform. In the spirit of journalism, we bear witness, only for layers of significance to reveal themselves as the ripples make their way through the quiet but never sedated hamlet.

This book thankfully avoids the obvious temptations when writing about one’s own memory. The stories we tell about ourselves find a balance between fact and fiction and often characters are made up of a succinct list of eccentricities rather than a sense of their being real flesh and blood. This is not the case for Manfishing - its cast is invariably jagged yet vulnerable, often mistaken but painfully honest. Their schemes and hopes never feel impersonal. The lines in the sand they defend feel desperate and the schemes they find themselves crafting are cruel. And while Pheasant may remain uncomfortable tampering with the character of a good man, the characters maintain their humanity in what they face. If nothing else can be said of the residents of Brexham in this book, then they retain their invariable sincerity. 

This book is inevitably written as a eulogy for the world that inspired it. The world it represents, its hallmarks being so well-polished, has a death toll hanging over it already. A new highway in the town is certain to take streets of people with it, who will be left to survive in a town they struggle to know. Despite this tackling of a social issue, the writing remains free from lofty moral outrage and the work is refreshed by the absence of lamenting, or a sense of bruised pride. For the residents of Brexham there simply exists the understanding that somewhere between their youth and now, the world of tinned fruits and sacrosanct truths has slipped out from under them. The result is a book populated less by nostalgia than by people standing for what they need. 

And so I am forced to render judgement on a work that has been in development longer than I have been alive, which defines a world I cannot imagine. As a piece of art, it is a book that finds itself amongst a saturated market of media - if we really are living through the “golden age of TV” then the British school will be remembered by its adoration for the period piece and the literature that followed eagerly behind. While belonging to this fashion is no sin, the dainty charm pursued within the book will invariably find that some readers who have been overexposed to the era. This overfamiliarity is sometimes exacerbated by the writing's use of accepted tropes of the genre, the result occasionally being a reader mentally a few steps ahead of the developing plot. That is not to say the book is predictable - its more brutal and explicit passages scorn any reader that hopes the book’s air of quietness will determine how its plot resolves. 

While these properties will no doubt keep any comfortable assumptions at bay, they do not explain the need for this book. It is a book that defines a life, a time and a place. It represents the cruelties, pleasantries, eccentricities and beauty of the possible lives that only echo through our world today. The book foresees the death of the first stage of media, the twilight of the rural insular communities and an assured morality under attack in the light of an oncoming cultural revolution. We feel this as the future they faced. Peter Pheasant gives us this world running as blood through the plot of a thriller, and he becomes the writer for a generation - it is for this that this book exists and why we should take note. Manfishing is the embodiment of the authentic excitement - of a Nottingham lost.

Manfishing is available to buy now from a range of bookshops.