The Gospel Of The Eels

Picador £16.99

It’s a fish that can slither through ditches and grasses on land for hours, live for 80 years in captivity, and has journeyed to the same elusive breeding grounds since a time before the continents drifted to their present positions.

In this lovely, thoughtful blend of natural science and memoir, Patrik Svensson elevates the European eel – the one that has been jellied, fried and roasted for centuries – to an almost mythical status and interweaves accounts of its history, life cycle and cultural significance with stories of his own relationship with his road-paver father.

Svensson grew up in rural Sweden and paints a picture of a natural idyll: a childhood spent by the grassy banks of a stream at twilight, throwing out spillers (long fishing lines with lots of hooks) to catch eels.

His father is a man of few words and it is through eelfishing that father and son gently bond.

The eel is an enigma and a reminder that there is so much that modern science doesn’t know. From Aristotle to a young

Sigmund Freud, many have tried and failed to pin down the eel’s slippery origins and, astonishingly, to this day no one has ever seen a mature adult European eel in its breeding ground in the Sargasso Sea.

Born in this ‘sea within a sea’ in the North Atlantic, tiny eel larvae spend three years crossing the ocean to Europe. They transform to glass eels and then yellow eels as they migrate inland to rivers and lakes where they spend the next 15 to 30 years.

Then some unknown trigger makes the fish mature into silver eels, which wander thousands of miles home to the Sargasso Sea to breed and die.

And now the once-abundant eel is critically endangered, thanks to humans. ‘Is it possible to erase a creature that has existed for at least 40million years?’ asks Svensson.

Sadly, it seems it may be. We must hope that this marvellous book is not the eel’s eulogy.