Slightly Foxed Edition No. 63: Luke Jennings, Blood Knots - Summer 2023

‘If you are not remotely interested in fly-fishing, this book will still enrich your life . . . The descriptions of the English countryside shimmer with wonder and mystery, even touching on the mystical in parts’ – Gustav Temple, The Chap

Slightly Foxed is an independent book publisher and literary journal that republishes out-of-print titles they feel are worthy of reissue. Blood Knots was originally published by Atlantic Books in 2010, but Slightly Foxed has turned it into a clothbound classic in a limited edition of 2000 . . . So who is Luke Jennings and what is a blood knot?

A blood knot is a common fisherman’s practice of tying one line to another, but this book is about much more than fishing – alright, it is about fly fishing, primarily, but the topic wraps itself around Jennings’ schooldays in the 1960s, his relationship with his decorated WWII hero father, and his piscatorial mentor and inspiration, Robert Nairac, a charismatic teacher, fly fisher and falconer who reads like someone out of an Evelyn Waugh novel.

Jennings is a journalist and author, best known for penning the Villanelle novels on which the television series Killing Eve was based. One might initially not see any connection between fly-fishing and Russian contract killers, but wait:

“This time I carried the hawk, awed by her lethal beauty. She saw everything long before we did; there would be a tightening of the talons, an intensifying of the amber gaze, a readying lift and fall of the wings.”

The possibility that the 13-year-old Jennings, mesmerised by the ruthless killing instinct of the hawk, began to percolate the idea of a cold-blooded, attractive female contract killer who could form the backbone of a series of novels that he would write when he was older seems not beyond credibility. Who cannot see Villanelle (or indeed Jodie Comer as the TV character) in the following lines:

“And then, without fuss, she lifted her wings, rose from the branch and, with talons and jesses streaming, seemed to slide down an incline of air. There was a brief, unseen commotion and the silvery sound of her bells. We found her in a nest of bramble, mantling the rabbit with her wings. One talon was clamped around its skull and the other sunk deep into its flank.”

Vegetarians will also find plenty to enjoy in this wonderful, beautifully bound book. The descriptions of the English countryside shimmer with wonder and mystery, even touching on the mystical in parts:

“Until that moment I had thought of angling as a process of making the invisible visible. Of drawing some dazzling, metalled creature from darkness into light, like an impulse from the subconscious. But here, to my 11-year-old self, was a new paradox: an object of maximum desire yet utterly unreachable”

“There’s that sudden, intense spirit of place you sometimes experience in the English countryside, the hair-raising sense of
the numinous. You turn a corner, and some configuration of contour, light and shadow stops you in your tracks. You’ve never been here before, but you know the place, and it calls out to you, reaches into your deep memory – its message one in which rapture and the ache of loss are inextricably entwined […] Fishing, more than any other activity, takes you to the places where such things happen.”

The places that fishing takes the author range from bucolic babbling brooks in Hampshire to menacing fly-tipped junkyards in inner London, where the book opens during his quest for an enormous pike. The icy cold, all-night vigil for this mythical monster leads Jennings to meditate on the Chaos Magic practices of 16th century occultist John Dee, though he cautions against getting too involved. “Specimen coarse fish are one thing, the Dark Lord of Entropy quite another.”

If you are not remotely interested in fly-fishing, this book will still enrich your life, and by the end of it, you will probably find yourself wondering whether it’s time to learn how to tie a blood knot and head for the river.

Review from The Chap magazine, Spring 2024

‘If you are not remotely interested in fly-fishing, this book will still enrich your life’ | The Chap Magazine

Gustav Temple, The Chap


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