This book, 'The Stream' by Brian Clarke, is a difficult and challenging book to know how to review. It is about a chalkstream, written by a well-known and respected angling journalist (he is the angling correspondent for The Times) and author and yet there is no fishing in it. So it is not a usual fishing book as well as being the author's first novel.

From the conversations and correspondence that I have had with Brian Clarke, the book needs to be seen as part of a much bigger attempt to stimulate debate about the state of rivers, fishing waters and the countryside in this country and an attempt to put pressure on our politicians to sit up and take more notice of the damage being done to this country's waters.

Perhaps the most important point the book makes is that the damage is being done often insidiously and unseen to most people. Nothing very much happens in the book yet it chronicles the damage being done by industry and development to a river valley. It mirrors the often unseen pace of change - unseen by those who do not want to see.

The river is the focal point of the book and people - who are, after all, the ones doing the damage - hardly appear at all. There are some characters in the book who could have been developed more and made it into a story with more universal appeal. I understand that the book has been entered for the Booker Prize - is this going to encourage people to read it knowing some of the entries for this competition over recent years? Sadly, not many of the people who ought to read this book will.

The book is about the announcement of an industrial development in a depressed rural area. It will bring jobs and money into that area. Some distance away, in a valley with a stream running through it, the ownership of a farm passes from father to son. Over time and unnoticed, the impact of the new development and the way the farm is being managed begin to compound one another. The pressures are felt most powerfully in the stream itself. And in many diverse ways.

The story of the stream is chronicled month by month and year by year. The third paragraph of Year 1, January, starts with the phrase "The law of continuing", a phrase which sadly soon starts to grate on the reader's nerves. He does stop using it so frequently after some chapters, but . . . Brian Clarke writes with real knowledge and commitment about chalkstreams, fish and all other forms of river and aquatic life. And real passion too. Writing about a flood that had released trout from the local hatchery he says: " All the way up the river and down, all of the fish that had escaped from the trout farm in the flood drove the wild fish away from the lies the law of continuing (that phrase!) had said they should have and the wild fish drove away the smaller fish of their own kind to make space for themselves.". This describes very graphically the unforeseen actions that can lead from one act of misplaced kindness (releasing mink into the wild for example) or man's folly.

I have read and enjoyed Brian Clarke's other books and his many newspaper columns on the first Monday of each month. However I do not feel that The Stream is written with the same fluency.

I hope that the book is a success and that people who might never read a fishing book will read this one. As it states on the dust jacket, "The Stream raises powerful questions about priorities and choices: about the kind of world we want - and are creating.". Food for thought indeed.

'The Stream' by Brian Clarke, published by Swan Hill Press at £14.95. Hardback 174 pages