FOR A MAN whose debut novel has generated the kind of lavish praise many long-time authors can only dream of, Paul Torday is coy almost to the point of self-deprecation. The author of the whimsical political satire Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is a study in reserve.
In conversation about the early excitement his first novel has aroused in the publishing world - inciting a bidding war and selling on into nine countries - he shows himself to be a skilled exponent of the art of that well-mannered understatement peculiar to the English. 'It's an act of supreme arrogance to write a novel at 60,' says Torday, who was actually 59 when the book was snapped up by publishers. 'So it wasn't something I expected to happen. But I'm delighted it has.'
Indeed, for a moment you might mistake this engineering investor and manager turned author for Dr Alfred Jones, the thoroughly English scientist protagonist of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. But it's not long before Torday's quick wit and ready chuckle betray the political shrewdness that underwrites his novel.
Part satire, part meditation on the nature of fly-fishing, faith - and the lack of it - Salmon Fishing veers between farce, satire and heroic odyssey. In it, Torday swipes at political spin and hypocrisy on the one hand, while fashioning a hymn to nature, faith and late-blooming love on the other.
Along with a raft of deliciously improbable characters, including an enigmatic sheikh, an all-too-smooth spin doctor, an inept terrorist, a wife from hell and a glamorous secretary named Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, it introduces perhaps the most unlikely protagonist to appear in a novel in recent years.
Jones is a smug, hen-pecked, middle-aged fisheries scientist. As the novel opens, he counts the major triumphs in life as the publication of an article on caddis fly larvae in Trout and Salmon and receiving a birthday gift of an electric toothbrush from his wife, Mary.
Life turns for Jones when he becomes reluctantly involved in a project to introduce salmon into the wadis of the Yemeni highlands - just as life turned for his creator, Torday, when he was travelling, not in Yemen, but in neighbouring Oman. It was there, Torday says, that he first became interested in exploring the way society in the Middle East is changing.
