If you like to read knuckle-whitening tales of monster muskie or king salmon, fighting tooth and nail for an hour to get free of a well-set hook, Chris Gudgeon’s Consider the Fish may be something of a disappointment, for there’s precious little of that kind of writing, which he calls “fish porn” in any case, in this fishing book. On the other hand, you’ll idle through a lot of books on the dock on summers’ afternoons, and enjoy the effort a lot less, before you come across a book that tells you more about fishing in Canada.

In Consider the Fish, Gudgeon takes a trip across Canada, stopping at several places that have strong fishing associations to talk to people and tell their stories (tall, unlikely, memorable – just like all good fishing tales). He fishes for the famous Tyee salmon in B.C.’s Campbell River; talks to commercial fishing folk in Gimli, Manitoba, which was once an independent Icelandic state within Canada; memorializes the famous World Tuna Championship in Wedgeport, Nova Scotia; and greets the Queen and Prince Phillip in the shadow of John Cabot, in Newfoundland. Along the way he talks to recreational fishers and to the men and women who hang on by their fingernails in Canada’s beleaguered fishery, and rises to heights of indignation about the way their way of life has been betrayed by successive goverment agencies, whose duty it should have been to secure and consolidate that way of life. Trading on his book-world contacts, he meets fishing poets and novelists who show him around the ropes and, kindly, the door. Best of all, as he swings across the country, he dredges up tons of interesting, historic, and arcane facts and information about fish and fishing in Canada, and fills in the chinks with the kind of oh-my-gosh, well-I-never-did, Ripleys-Believe-It-Or-Not trivia, which you can trot out to amaze your pals around the fishing campfire.

Starting with a quick but comprehensive history of the relationship between fish and Canada (the former forced the creation of the latter, he argues), which ought to be compulsory reading for everyone who claims to be Canadian, and especially for politicians (so they’ll know and understand what it is they are monkeying with when the blithely do their end-runs around Canada’s fishing communities), Gudgeon has written an engaging, richly peopled travelogue with philosophical, political, social, and literary outbursts. His puns are real groaners – his trip was his “Royal Fishin’ Commission,” the book his “Canadian Fhishstory”– but he can catch the whole essence of a person, a moment or an argument in a few genial but profoundly perceptive comments. Isaak Walton he ain’t; Studs Terkel he ain’t neither; but he’s a damned good Chris Gudgeon, and that’s enough for me on a warm afternoon in the boat, when the fish are ignoring my hook.