Sweden, when Andrew Brown arrived there in the 1970s, was as near as any country has ever come to a socialist paradise. Its people were, he found, bonded by a firm sense of civic duty and shared values. Everyone knew what it was acceptable to think. Society, it was agreed, would benefit more from co-operation than from selfishness. Affluence was bad for people. Failure to want social equality was regarded as a handicap to be pitied and, if possible, cured. Armed conflict was seen as wasteful and to be avoided. Sweden had avoided it for 150 years, remaining neutral in the second world war. Drunkenness was an obvious evil, so teetotalism was encouraged. Alcohol could be bought only at government stores, which were ringed with health warnings and made as unalluring as possible. It was assumed that, as time went on, the world would become more peaceful, more egalitarian and more like Sweden. That was what progress meant.

Many young people in Europe and America felt this kind of optimism in the 1960s, but somehow it translated into reality only in Sweden. The explanation, Brown suggests, may lie in the country's history and class structure. Scarcely anyone in Sweden was more than three generations away from subsistence farming. The disciplines of poverty had taught them frugality and solidarity, so that when prosperity came they were determined to make it communal and not to squander it. Under the leadership of prime minister Olof Palme, Sweden became one of the world's richest nations. There was full employment and no housing shortage. In the early 1970s, Palme's Social Democrats had built 1m new, affordable, modern homes for workers, more than satisfying demand. Selective schooling was abolished, and the last powers of the Swedish monarchy removed. Lack of ostentation was a Social Democratic tradition. Palme lived in an ordinary terrace house, and what he most desired, Brown thinks, was not money or power but the admiration of all decent people. It is hard to think of any recent British politician of whom that could be said.

Brown landed up in Sweden more or less by chance. His father, a diplomat and the director of a shipping line, had sent him to a “rather grand” school, from which he was expelled for some undisclosed offence at the age of 16. After several years of “hippie-ish wanderings”, also undisclosed, he worked as a carer in a Cheshire Home, thinking that, even if he had failed his parents' expectations, he was being useful. Among the nurses was a young Swedish woman, Anita, and in 1977 they hitch-hiked to Sweden and set up house together. It was the start of a struggle to find some meaning in life and in himself. He got a job in a small factory making wooden pallets. The work was exhausting, but gave him time to think. He read a lot of philosophy, learnt Swedish, and became seriously interested in fishing. He had fished for pike and perch in nearby lakes when they first arrived, simply to put food on the table. But it soon outgrew practical considerations and became, in effect, his religion. It was inseparable in his mind from the freedom he felt when he was alone in the wild, surrounded by silence and the smell of trees. He graduated to fly fishing and became expert at making his own flies, and at guessing which of the innumerable varieties of insect available in Sweden the fish he was pursuing would prefer.

Clearly there is something rather sad about someone who devotes himself to outwitting fish. But Brown writes with enough skill and ardour to keep that thought at bay. His sanity, we come to realise, was at stake. He tells how on one of his solitary fishing trips he woke in the night, shaking with terror and a feeling of revulsion from the world. He rushed to the car, grabbed his fishing waistcoat, weighed down with boxes of imitation flies, and found he could breathe normally again. Next morning he woke up “quite sane”.

Meanwhile, he and Anita married and had a son, Felix, with whom he tried, in vain, to share his piscatory obsession. It was not fishing, though, that put an end to the marriage but Brown's ambition to become a writer. He wanted to be “one at whom the whole world marvelled”, and the likely way to achieve this, he thought, was writing for The Spectator. He started sending the magazine pieces about Sweden in the 1980s, and fairly soon he abandoned Anita and Felix and moved to London. They tried joining him for a while, but quickly went back home. He found another wife, of whom we learn only that she was a “pretty, intelligent English woman” who liked fishing, and he moved from The Spectator to The Independent, becoming its religious affairs correspondent in 1986. He had undergone, he tells us, at least one mystical experience while communing with fish, but whether that is what stimulated his interest in religious affairs remains unclear.

Much later he went back to Sweden and found it had changed beyond recognition. When the Social Democrats lost power their ideals had been speedily abandoned and their welfare system dismantled, to be replaced by a dogmatic distrust of state control. The railways and postal service had been privatised and private schooling encouraged. By the end of the 1990s, Sweden was no longer the safe, prosperous, tolerant country he had known. Violent crime had increased by 40%, rape by 80%. Obesity and drunkenness were common. Heroin smuggling and organised crime had created a new breed of super-rich gangsters. A large immigrant population, with a crime rate at least double that among native Swedes, was fomenting resentment and racial hatred.

Fishing in Utopia is a lament for a lost Eden. But it is more than that. Essentially it is a story of modern rootlessness and the search for something to believe in. The fact that that something turns out, absurdly, to be fishing only makes it more tragic. I can see it becoming a cult book, and not just among anglers. You do not (I can personally guarantee) need to have the slightest interest in fishing to be caught up in his rapt descriptions of reels and lines and casting and flies and the enormous quiet of Sweden's uninhabited places. In the last section he drives up into the Swedish arctic to be alone and write. It is a journey into the past. At a lonely farm he comes upon an old couple, and finds that the wife not only believes in trolls but has seen one, a little grey man about 2ft high. Trolls are, he learns, benevolent spirits, quite likely to take milk from a cow at night, but happy to do humans favours in return. Further on, he joins in a traditional midsummer festival. A maypole is decorated with birch branches and flowers and hauled aloft. Girls and men dance round it through the white summer night. The music comes from an instrument, special to the locality, with 11 steel strings and three banks of keys, which sounds “like an accordion on the verge of tears”. That is not a bad description of the tone of this book.

Fishing in Utopia by Andrew Brown
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