Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
by Paul Torday
My only bookclub read this month! (Veld & Flora hectic time).
This is Torday's first novel – an easy, breezy, funny, pastiche (just a bit unsubtle sometimes) of a novel about a typical successful young British chap with a good job as a fisheries scientist, and a socially acceptable and enviable but unloving, materialistic, barren (in all sense of the word) marriage, who falls in love and discovers a sort of mysticism while designing a scheme to introduce salmon into the Yemen. He is strong-armed into taking on this absurd project in the first place, but it takes over and alters his life.
This is Torday's first novel – an easy, breezy, funny, pastiche (just a bit unsubtle sometimes) of a novel about a typical successful young British chap with a good job as a fisheries scientist, and a socially acceptable and enviable but unloving, materialistic, barren (in all sense of the word) marriage, who falls in love and discovers a sort of mysticism while designing a scheme to introduce salmon into the Yemen. He is strong-armed into taking on this absurd project in the first place, but it takes over and alters his life.
It is written in a series of email letters, press releases, interview scrips and diary entries; and somehow it works.
See another good review at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3662973/Land-a-fish-and-change-your-life.html
See another good review at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3662973/Land-a-fish-and-change-your-life.html
The author
Paul Torday wrote Salmon Fishing in the Yemen at the age of 59 after a lifetime running engineering firms around Newcastle. He had “read” English at Oxford but joined his father in the family business repairing ships' engines. When the business, Torday and Carlisle, was subject to a hostile takeover and he become “non-executive chairman of the next company but one” he sat down in the old staff flat upstairs in his home in Northumberland and started to write. Home is Chipchase Castle, a large Jacobean house with fishing (he does indeed love salmon fishing), a farm and a shoot.
His next novel, The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce, is about another emotionally frostbitten hero - Francis Wilberforce, who has made a fortune designing software. This alcoholic hero is "on the verge of autism. (He's adopted by people who wanted a baby, but when they get one they don't really like it.)
His next novel, The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce, is about another emotionally frostbitten hero - Francis Wilberforce, who has made a fortune designing software. This alcoholic hero is "on the verge of autism. (He's adopted by people who wanted a baby, but when they get one they don't really like it.)
Unfortunately it wasn't given terribly good reviews.
This comment on Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday ( Phoenix, 2008) by Caroline.
Book no. 2170 (Sue).
Woodland book rating 3½.
