Fishing For The Perfect Story

Sun Herald

Sunday February 25, 2007

Bron Sibree

Salmon Fishing In The Yemen is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $32.95.

Paul Torday's first published work is among the most whimsical of political satires, writes Bron Sibree.

FOR A MAN whose debut novel has generated the kind of lavish praise that many long-time authors only dream of, Paul Torday is coy to the point of being self-deprecating. In fact, you could say the author of Salmon Fishing In The Yemen is a study in reserve - a skilled exponent of the art of well-mannered Englishness - as he speaks about the early excitement his debut novel generated. It started a bidding war in the publishing world, and sold in nine countries.

"I think it's an act of supreme arrogance to write a novel at 60," Torday says.

"It wasn't something I expected to happen. But I'm delighted it has."

For a fleeting moment you might mistake this engineering investor and manager-turned-author for his character Dr Alfred Jones - a thoroughly English and oh-so-reserved scientist.

But it doesn't take long for Torday's quick wit and ready chuckle to betray the political shrewdness that underwrites his oddly named, improbably contrived, yet inspired novel.

Part satire, part meditation on fly-fishing and faith and the lack of it, Salmon Fishing In The Yemen veers between farce, satire and a kind of odyssey. Torday swipes at political spin and hypocrisy on one hand, while fashioning a kind of hymn to nature, faith and late-blooming love on the other.

Along with a raft of memorable characters, including an enigmatic sheik, an inept terrorist, the wife from hell and a glamorous secretary named Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, it introduces perhaps the most unlikely protagonist to appear in recent years in the form of Jones - a smug, henpecked, middle-aged fisheries scientist.

The novel opens with Jones recounting his major triumphs in life: getting his article on caddis fly larvae published in Trout And Salmon and receiving a birthday gift of a new electric toothbrush from his wife, Mary.

Life turns when Jones becomes reluctantly involved in a project to introduce salmon into the wadis of the Yemeni highlands. Just as it turned for Torday, when he was travelling, not in the Yemen, but in neighbouring Oman. It was there that he first became interested in exploring the way society in the Middle East was changing.

"The reflection I had is that it would be a shame if some of these [traditional] values were lost from Arab societies," he says. "If you think about the Middle East, you do think about the way, in particular, the US and the UK have intervened to introduce democracy, and how these attempts to intervene in other people's cultures very rarely succeed. And the book is in a sense a metaphor for that."

Not that Torday wants to present the novel as "a profound philosophical work".

"Arab society is a very ancient and sophisticated society, but we go to them and say look what can you learn from us. We never go to them and say what can we earn from you," he says.

"A writer, I think, must be careful not to pretend to know too much about what he's writing about. One simply wants to point the way and I think humour is always the best strategy to deal with serious ideas."

Bizarre doesn't even begin to describe the deliciously sly, ironic humour that drives much of the novel, or the deft way in which Torday parodies political spin and hypocrisy. He admits the novel, fashioned from emails and diary entries, is even structured along the lines of the Hutton Report - the famous 2004 British governmental inquiry into the death of government weapons inspector David Kelly and "sexed-up" intelligence reports.

Despite this, and despite the fact that his spin doctor bears an uncanny resemblance to Tony Blair's former hack Alistair Campbell, Torday insists his fictional character is generic.

Torday first became familiar with the workings of power in the corridors of Whitehall during the late 1980s and '90s when he was regional director of the Confederation of British Industry, representing industry to government.

But most helpful in the writing process was that he didn't really care what happened.

"It was just something I wanted to do for myself," he says. "So I wasn't daunted by it. I thought, if someone wants to publish it, great. If they don't, well, I've had fun writing it, and I'll put it in a drawer."

Torday has always wanted to write. He read English literature at Oxford and penned two unpublished novels in his 20s. But then he got drawn into the family engineering business.

He left the business to work for other engineering companies until 1995, when he bought into a company that manufactured equipment measuring oil and gas flows.

This took him to the Middle East, and so began a love affair with Oman.

He took his wife on holiday there 10 times before attempting to write the novel. In 2000 he sold the company, giving him the time to write.

What struck him about the Middle East was the way in which religion permeated every aspect of life, in sharp contrast to the secular nature of Western societies.

"We are going through a period . . . when humanist scientists writing about the idea of a universe without a God in it are in vogue," he says. "If you look at books that sell really well, like Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, you get a sense of this [trend] that religion's something we ought to be able to do without, and rational, humanist society is the way forward. I disagree with that.

"I think that faith in something is absolutely essential to human nature and if you write that out of the script then we are dehumanising ourselves."

When it comes to the issue of faith, Torday says the fictional Jones is "where I am".

"And where I think a lot of people are, in that we'd like to believe but are not quite sure what to believe in because our own church, the church we were brought up in, is so muddled."

Also like Jones, Torday believes the salmon itself - which haunts the pages of this novel in all its silvery and mysterious beauty - "is the most enchanting symbol of pure faith I can think of".

With a new novel almost complete, Torday is keen to wind down his business interests even further. "I'd hate to be out of it altogether, but I'd like to have more time for writing," he says.

He goes fishing most weekends but says he is not obsessed by it. If anything consumes him, it is the search for the "ultimate" story.

"There must be a story somewhere . . . that's going to bewitch people," he says.

"If only I could find out what it is. And that's why I want to go on writing."

© 2007 Sun Herald

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