To the aspiring novelist, Paul Torday is a poster boy. He had his first story published in a women’s magazine in 1965. Then, for four decades, there was nothing apart from a couple of efforts deemed worthy only of the bottom drawer. The theory that, knocking on 60, he might finally ignite his literary ambition was as absurd a notion as, say, fishing for salmon in the Yemen.
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was published in 2007. The film version, starring Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt, is about to come out. And near the start of every year since, a sprightly new novel by Torday has followed. The latest is The Legacy of Hartlepool Hall, set like several of his books in his native Northumberland and telling of the moneyed county set in which Torday contentedly moves, though his working life has in fact been spent in the engineering industry.
The bizarre idea for his first success came in a business meeting. I’d been travelling a lot to the Middle East. Also, I was helping to set up a charity to do with the health of the local river. I like fishing. In one of those meetings, while not listening to what was going on, I got this crossover idea: fishing, desert. It would be nice to write a book that was really a metaphor for not getting involved in the Middle East.
He began writing it in the form of emails, like a modern-day Clarissa or The Woman in White, then loosened the stylistic straitjacket to include diaries, memos and interview transcripts. The proposal he sent off told of a shy government fisheries scientist (McGregor in the film) in a dry marriage who is retained against his will by a posh female surveyor (Blunt) to pitch an idea to a peace-loving Yemeni sheikh keen to cast his rod in a desert wadi.
All the Yemenis said to me, ‘What’s all this stuff about the fish?’ Luckily for me, the Yemenis on the whole have got a very good sense of humour, although when I gave a lecture at the University of Sana’a there was a man with a very suspect beard at the back of the room who kept asking me whether I thought salmon fishing was Islamic or not. I kept well away from that one.
Telegraph Media Group Limited 2012