Desert Dessert (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen - Paul Torday)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	Salmon Fishing in the Yemen - Paul Torday
Date:	16/03/07 (252 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: enjoyable, moving, mad

Disadvantages: none

I discovered the book in the English corner of a German bookshop, the bright blue cover with the silvery fish caught my eye (they glow in semi-darkness!), the bizarre title appealed to me and the blurb ‘A wonderful novel’ convinced me that I should buy it, not because that’s a highly original remark but because it is from Marina Lewycka, author of ‘A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian’, a novel I appreciate. Not living in GB I didn’t know that Salmon Fishing in the Yemen had already become a top seller there and the Hardcover edition had moved to No 117 on the sales rank of Amazon.co.uk. A virtual friend has abstained from reading it up to now, however, suspecting it to be too gimmicky for her liking. Let’s have a look whether her suspicion is justified.

A stinking rich Yemeni sheikh and dyed-in-the-wool Anglophile owns an estate in Scotland with a river running through, where he pursues his hobby of salmon fishing whenever he is in the country. He dreams of introducing salmon fishing to the Yemen as a means of uniting his countrymen regardless of their tribal and class background, - fishermen standing on the bank of a river don’t argue with each other, they’re quiet and peaceful and united by a common goal - besides, he believes that Allah wants him to do this. For the sheikh the seemingly miraculous migration of the salmon from the ocean to the stream where it was born is an allegory for the human journey towards God.

He asks the office dealing with his British affairs to find an expert who can help him realise his vision, the woman in charge, Ms Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, is referred to Dr. Alfred Jones, a civil servant at the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence. Not surprisingly, the latter finds the scheme ludicrous, so much so that he even doesn’t reply himself but makes his assistant send an e-mail culminating in the word ‘unfeasible’. Fish in the desert? No way!

Ms Harriet is ambitious and doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, besides, she doesn’t see the sheikh merely as a client, she likes the man, so she pulls a string, she rings an old friend in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and tells him about the project “…with all this bad news coming out of the rest of the Middle East, isn’t this a potential good news story?” The targeted audience jump at the idea, Peter Maxwell, spinner-in-chief, director of communications to the PM, Jay Vent (?!), spots a perfect photo opportunity: the PM, rod in hand, in a Yemeni wadi, guaranteed to divert public attention from the “less constructive news items” - read “mayhem and carnage” - elsewhere in the region. Here we have pure political satire and especially British readers will enjoy the many allusions.

Very soon the story gathers momentum, Dr. Alfred Jones is made to work on the project with the help of very unsubtle threats. Where does this mad idea lead to? The plot is original and I found myself engrossed in the story which is full of unprecedented events and has an unpredictable ending.

The main characters, the goodies Dr. Alfred Jones, Ms Harriet Chetwode-Talbot and His Excellency Sheikh Muhammad ibn Zaidi bani Tihama and the baddy Peter Maxwell are well drawn, the shy boffin who understands the mating habits of freshwater mussels but not why his marriage to Mary, a high-flyer in international banking, has become stale (they have been married for over twenty years, for their last wedding anniversary Alfred gave Mary an Economist subscription and she gave him a replacement part for his electric toothbrush), approaching middle-age he feels an ‘increasing sense of intellectual and emotional restlessness’. Ms Harriet, the posh career woman whose middle name is Efficiency but who suffers horribly when her fiancé is sent on a military mission to Iraq; the Sheikh, a wise man, whose maxim is, “Without faith, there is no hope. Without faith, there is no love”. This can be seen as the core message of the novel: the importance of believing in something and the comparative unimportance of everything else.

Will Alfred and Harriet become an item now that they’re thrown together in this mad enterprise? I’ve enjoyed very much how Paul Torday treats the relationship, refreshing in an age in which ‘Sex Sells’ is the motto for so many authors. He may be considered old-fashioned in this respect, the way he tells the story is certainly up-to-date, though. It isn’t told continuously from beginning to end but in letters, e-mails, interviews, articles in newspapers ranging from Trout & Stream to The Times, excerpts from the Hansard report and exchanges between al-Qa’ida operatives, here Torday shows that he's a brill stylist. Normally I’m not a great fan of experimental writing but I liked reading this novel, it doesn’t only consist of snippets, that would really make me nervous, there are long prose passages from Alfred’s diary and Harriet’s letters to her fiancé which form the body of the text so-to-speak.

Here we get atmospheric descriptions of the Scottish highlands with lairds and castles, mists and glens and also of the beauty of the Yemeni landscape, the hospitality of the Sheikh, the smell and taste of spicy Arabic food; Paul Torday has often visited the Middle East and according to an arabist has got nearly everything right. If that isn’t a compliment!

There’s something else I’d like to mention: the main topic of the novel is salmon fishing, what do *you* know about it? I don’t know anything about fishing at all to say nothing about salmon, but although many details are given, the novel doesn’t deteriorate into a lecture - something I’ve noticed about Ian McEwan’s novels, he researches too much and this shows too much. I must confess that I haven’t understood all the technical fishing terms but I’ve learnt that the female salmon is called hen and the male one cock, who’d have thunk it?

I’ve skimmed through some reviews and noticed only positive ones for this debut novel, I can’t but join in the hymns of praise.

Dear virtual friend, the book is not too gimmicky and I think you'd enjoy it!

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Weidenfeld & Nicholson
Paperback 10.99 GBP
321 pages

Summary: A rich sheikh wants to introduce salmon fishing in the Yemen.