The Snowfly (Reviewed)

The Snowfly
By Joseph Heywood
The Lyons Press, 2000
ISBN 1-58574 -- 020 -- 9
$24.95, 464 pages, hardcover

Over the past few years I’ve read several novels wherein a major, if not the central theme has been fly fishing. Some have been staged in northern New England, one in western Montana, two here in Michigan, three in Great Britain, and one in the Pacific Northwest. All were entertaining, but only The River Why held tightly when I read it and has stayed with me through the years as a work of high merit. I often longed for another story of like masterful weaving and worried that it would not come.
Then last Fall I met Joe Heywood of Kalamazoo. We fished together below Mio and it dawned on me that this was the Joe Heywood -- the acclaimed author of Taxi Dancer, The Berkut, and The Domino Conspiracy.
Pressing a bit, I discovered that he had just completed a new work, The Snowfly, that would be published by The Lyons Press in the Fall of 2000. He told me just enough about the story to set the hook solidly. I obtained a copy of the advance, uncorrected proof (galleys) and read it straight through.
This is a story of intrigue and passion, a search begun, interrupted and resumed for a haunting, mysterious grail. The Snowfly is elusive, the rarest of all may flies. It hatches only once on a river, only once in several years, likely only once in an angler’s lifetime. It brings gargantuan trout to the surface to feed with gluttonous abandon. It leaves few clues to its schedule, location, reality. It fans embers to fire in those few who know of or suspect its existence, who hunt ethereal clues, who campaign continents, and suffer winter’s fury in the hope of finding the hatch.
Bowie Rhodes is a northern Michigan country boy of meager family means, a curious nature and high intellect. His early home is on a trout stream of merit and the unsolved mysteries of angling take him at an early age. Some seemingly disjointed events and the work of an old scholar hint at the existence of the giant may fly and the young man’s quest begins.
Throughout his years as a student at Michigan State University and his career as a foreign correspondent for UPI, the Snowfly taunts and beckons again and again with vague clues and on mysterious trails. He is stunned by his accidental discovery of an unpublished manuscript in a villa in the highlands of Vietnam. The manuscript is lost during a vicious battle with the NVA, but Bowie escapes to safety if not peace of mind.
The unfathomable author of the manuscript, M. J. Key, surfaces repeatedly and becomes as personally intriguing as his work on the Snowfly. The search for Key and the Snowfly trails far. Bowie winds through Manhattan, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, England, Arizona, the Upper Peninsula, yet the truth remains beyond reach. Maybe the answer is closer to home. Where is home? The Upper Peninsula, the northern Lower Peninsula, his boyhood river?
This is a captivating story, a novel reflective of diligent, rigorous research. It presents a finely tuned plot and masterful, literary craftsmanship. It will stand with The River Why as the finest of its kind. Is there a Snowfly? What a hatch it must be! RWOL

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