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Salmon Fishing In The Yemen Paperback – April 21, 2008
| Paul Torday (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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What does it take to make us believe in the impossible?For Dr. Alfred Jones, life is a quiet mixture of civil service at the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence and marriage to Mary—an ambitious, no-nonsense financier. But a strange turn of fate from an unexpected direction forces Jones to upend his existence and spend all of his time in pursuit of another man’s ludicrous dream. Can there be salmon in the Yemen? Science says no. But if resources are limitless and the visionary is inspired, maybe salmon fishing in the Yemen isn’t impossible. Then again, maybe nothing is.
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateApril 21, 2008
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.93 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100156034565
- ISBN-13978-0156034562
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Editorial Reviews
Review
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN
"A wonderful novel―a cry for humanity in our target-driven, spin-riddled world." ―MARINA LEWYCKA, author of A SHORT HISTORY OF TRACTORS IN UKRAINIAN —
From the Inside Flap
So why does he feel as though something is missing?
When he is asked to become involved in a project to create a salmon river in the Highlands of the Yemen, Fred rejects the idea as absurd. But the proposal catches the eye of several senior British politicians, who feel it might distract the media’s attention from the less welcome stories coming out of the Middle East. It’s not long before the wheels of government start spinning, and the publicity-savvy Prime Minister is talking about the project on television. Fred finds himself forced to set aside his research and instead figure out how to fly ten thousand salmon to a desert country … and persuade them to swim there.
The project is the brainchild of a Yemeni sheikh: a devout and wealthy man, whose love of salmon fishing and whose fervent, unwavering conviction that the impossible can be made possible, eventually, and astonishingly, inspires Fred, overpowering all his rational objections – and infuriating his wife.
When Fred meets Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, the sheikh’s elegant and beautiful land agent, the cracks that have begun to form in his carefully managed existence grow even wider, and as they both embark on an extraordinary journey of faith – and fishing – the diffident Dr Jones will discover a sense of belief, and a capacity for love, and for heroism, that surprises himself, and all who know him.
From the Back Cover
"The remarkable thing is that a book about so deeply serious a matter can make you laugh, all the way to a last twist…. [A] parable about the mystery of belief and its transforming power… Salmon Fishing is extraordinary indeed, and a triumph." -The Guardian "Torday's clear talent is in striking…a variety of notes, from soulful to satirical, and making them work as one bracing, bittersweet whole. -- Seattle Times
About the Author
PAUL TORDAY studied English literature at Pembroke College, Oxford, before embarking on a business career. He lives in Northumberland. This is his first book.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THE ORIGINS OF THE
YEMEN SALMON PROJECT
Fitzharris & Price
Land Agents & Consultants
St James’s Street
London
Dr Alfred Jones
National Centre for Fisheries Excellence
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Smith Square
London
15 May
Dear Dr Jones
We have been referred to you by Peter Sullivan at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (Directorate for Middle East and North Africa). We act on behalf of a client with access to very substantial funds, who has indicated his wish to sponsor a project to introduce salmon, and the sport of salmon fishing, into the Yemen.
We recognise the challenging nature of such a project, but we have been assured that the expertise exists within your organisation to research and project manage such work, which of course would bring international recognition and very ample compensation for any fisheries scientists who became involved. Without going into any further details at this time, we would like to seek a meeting with you to identify how such a project could be initiated and resourced, so that we may report back to our client and seek further instructions.
We wish to emphasise that this is regarded by our client, who is a very eminent Yemeni citizen, as a flagship project for his country. He has asked us to make clear that there will be no unreasonable financial constraints. The Foreign & Commonwealth Office supports this project as a symbol of Anglo-Yemeni cooperation.
Yours sincerely
(Ms) Harriet Chetwode-Talbot
National Centre for Fisheries Excellence
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Smith Square
London
Ms Harriet Chetwode-Talbot
Fitzharris & Price
Land Agents & Consultants
St James’s Street
London
1 June
Dear Ms Chetwode-Talbot
Dr Jones has asked me to thank you for your letter dated 15 May and reply as follows.
Migratory salmonids require cool, well-oxygenated water in which to spawn. In addition, in the early stages of the salmon life cycle, a good supply of fly life indigenous to northern European rivers is necessary for the juvenile salmon parr to survive. Once the salmon parr evolves into its smolt form, it then heads downriver and enters saltwater. The salmon then makes its way to feeding grounds off Iceland, the Faroes or Greenland. Optimum sea temperatures for the salmon and its natural food sources are between 5 and 10 degrees Celsius.
We conclude that conditions in the Yemen and its geographical location relatively remote from the North Atlantic make the project your client has proposed unfeasible, on a number of fundamental grounds. We therefore regret we will be unable to help you any further in this matter.
Yours sincerely
Ms Sally Thomas (Assistant to Dr Jones)
Office of the Director, National Centre for Fisheries Excellence
From: David Sugden
To: Dr Alfred Jones
Subject: Fitzharris & Price/ Salmon/ Yemen
Date: 3 June
Alfred
I have just received a call from Herbert Berkshire, who is private secretary to the parliamentary undersecretary of state at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
The FCO view is very clear that this project is to be given our fullest consideration. Notwithstanding the very real practical difficulties in the proposal from Fitzharris & Price, of which as your director I am fully aware, the FCO feel that we should seek to give what support we can to this project.
Given the recent reductions in grant-in-aid funding for NCFE, we should not be too hasty to decline work which apparently connects us to excellent private sector funding sources.
Yours
David
Memo
From: Alfred Jones
To: Director, NCFE
Subject: Salmon/ Yemen
Date: 3 June
David
I appreciate the points you have raised in your memo of today’s date. Having given the matter my fullest consideration, I remain unable to see how we could help Fitzharris & Price and their client. The prospect of introducing salmon to the wadis of the Hadramawt seems to me, quite frankly, risible.
I am quite prepared to back this up with the relevant science, should anyone at the FCO require further information on our grounds for not proceeding.
Alfred
Office of the Director, National Centre for Fisheries Excellence
From: David Sugden
To: Dr Alfred Jones
Subject: Salmon/ Yemen
Date: 4 June
Dr Jones
Please accept this memo as my formal instruction to proceed to the next stage of the Yemen salmon project with Fitzharris & Price. I would like you to meet Ms Harriet Chetwode-Talbot and receive a full briefing, following which you are to develop and cost an outline scope of work for this project for me to review and forward to the FCO.
I take full responsibility for this decision.
David Sugden
-----
FROM: <Fred.Jones@ncfe.gov.uk>
DATE: 4 June
TO: <David.Sugden@ncfe.gov.uk>
SUBJECT: Yemen Salmon Project
David
Can we talk about this? I’ll pop round to your office after the departmental meeting.
Alfred
-----
FROM: <Fred.Jones@ncfe.gov.uk>
DATE: 4 June
TO: <Mary.Jones@interfinance.org>
SUBJECT: Job
DarlingI am being put under unreasonable pressure by David Sugden to put my name to some totally insane project dreamed up by the FCO to do with salmon being introduced into the Yemen. There have been memos flying around on this for days and I suppose I thought it was so bizarre I didn’t even mention it to you last time we spoke. I popped into David S’s office just now and said, “Look, David, be reasonable. This project is not only totally absurd and scientifically nonsensical, but if we allow our name to be involved no one in the fisheries world will ever take us seriously again.”
Sugden was totally stone-faced. He said (pompously), “This one is coming from higher up. It isn’t just some minister at the FCO with a bee in his bonnet. It goes all the way to the top. You’ve had my instruction. Please get on with it.”
I have not been spoken to like that since I left school. I am seriously considering handing in my resignation.
Love
Fred
PS When are you back from your management training course?
-----
FROM: <Mary.Jones@interfinance.org>
DATE: 4 June
TO: <Fred.Jones@ncfe.gov.uk>
SUBJECT: Financial realities
Fred
My annual salary is £75,000 gross and yours is £45,561. Our combined net of taxed monthly income is £7,333 out of which our mortgage takes £3,111, rates, food and other household expenses a further £1,200, and that’s before we think about car costs, holidays, and your fishing extravagances. Resign your job? Don’t be a prat.
Mary
PS I am home on Thursday but I have to leave on Sunday for New York for a conference on Sarbanes-Oxley.
Memo
From: Andrew MacFadzean, principal private secretary to the secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs
To: Herbert Berkshire, private secretary to the parliamentary undersecretary of state, FCO
Subject: Salmon/ Yemen Project
Herbert
Our masters tell us this project should be pushed on a bit. The sponsor is not a UK citizen, but the project can be presented as a template for Anglo-Yemeni cooperation, which of course has wider implications for perceptions of UK involvement in the Middle East.
I think you could quietly drop a word in the ear of David Sugden, whom I believe is the director of the fisheries people at DEFRA, that a successful outcome to this project might attract the attention of the committee putting forward recommendations for the next New Year honours list. Equally it is only fair to point out that an unsuccessful outcome might make it difficult to defend NCFE against further cuts in grant funding in the next round of negotiations with the Treasury for the new financial year. This might help get the right messages across. We have, of course, talked at a senior level to the appropriate people in DEFRA. Keep this off the record.
Lunch at the club at 1 P.M. tomorrow?
Yrs
Andy
Memo
From: Director of communications, prime minister’s office
To: Dr Mike Ferguson, director veterinary, food & aquatic sciences, Chief Scientists’ Group
Subject: Yemen salmon project
Mike
This is the sort of initiative that the prime minister really, really likes. We want some broad-brush comments on feasibility from you. We do not require anyone to say absolutely that it would work, only that there is no reason for not trying.
Peter
Memo
From: Dr Michael Ferguson, director veterinary, food & aquatic sciences, Chief Scientists’ Group
To: Peter Maxwell, director of communications, prime minister’s office
Subject: Yemen salmon project
Dear Mr Maxwell
Monthly average rainfall in the western mountains of the Yemen is around four hundred millimetres in each of the summer months, and mean temperatures at elevations above two thousand metres fall to a range of between seven and twenty-seven degrees Celsius. This is not uncharacteristic of British summer weather and therefore we conclude that for short periods of the year conditions exist, particularly in the western provinces of the Yemen, which are not necessarily inimical to migratory salmonids.
We therefore speculate that a model based on the artificial release and introduction of salmonids into the wadi systems for short periods of the year, linked to a programme of trapping the salmon and returning them to cooler, saline water during other periods of...
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Product details
- Publisher : Mariner Books; First edition (April 21, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0156034565
- ISBN-13 : 978-0156034562
- Item Weight : 12 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.93 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #583,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #536 in British & Irish Humor & Satire
- #1,286 in Dark Humor
- #2,122 in Sports Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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I find the main characters likable. Mary, Fred's wife, is a bit unbelievable -- is anyone really THAT cold and stiff? Oh yeah, she's British. But even so...
Maybe it's because I'm reading this after a book of Alice Munro's short stories (that left me feeling a bit depressed) that I'm enjoying it so much, but I AM enjoying it.
Gotta get back to it and if I change my mind in the next hour or so, I'll amend my review. : )
Now consider the chances of finding a novel that adroitly mixes not just Yemen and salmon fishing but also the British Parliament, Al Qaeda, a mystical sheikh, the art of public relations, a sad love story, and a journey of self-discovery. Before I read this book, I would have defied anyone to accomplish that seemingly impossible task. But Paul Torday has managed to do so, brilliantly, producing a satirical treatment of British politics that is alternately affecting and screamingly funny.
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is the first of British author Paul Torday's six novels to date. Written when he was 59 years old at the end of a successful business careeer, the book reportedly allowed him to write about what he knows best (as every teacher urges in Creative Writing 101). As you might guess, what Paul Torday appears to know best are salmon fishing and the Middle East, and the resulting novel is the unique expression of a genuine talent.
(From [...])
But the novel is engaging purely on the story level. Torday has an ingenious method of getting the reader's attention through a serious of progressively revealing emails, and then you are full bore into the lives of the protagonists, anxious to find out what happens next to Dr. Alfred Jones. Torday continues the correspondence method, but you don't feel like you're reading letters, press releases, and inquisitions; you forget as you listen to the play-by-play conversations and developing emotions. And though there is romance here, it doesn't develop at all as one might expect- nor, at the end, is the true romance with whom you expected.
And for those who are interested, Torday has something to teach as well- in a purely non-overbearing manner. There is religion, and there is spirituality, and not always are the two divided. There is a knowledge of God, and the knowledge of one's Lord that comes from intimacy. And contrary to what we often here in stereotypes of the world's religions, that intimacy can show up in some of the most surprising places.
I have no reservations in declaring this the finest Yemen fish novel I've ever read. (And that actually says something- I found it slightly better than the other great Yemeni marine biology work, Pirates, Bats, And Dragons: A Science Adventure (Science Adventures) .) If you love the Middle East and you love fishes, you will love this book.
Top reviews from other countries
A year later I was in Abkhazia, writing about hazel-wattle buildings, when I was asked to lunch by a local family. They said they had a great surprise and produced upon the table an enormous fish, which, they said, they didn't know what it was never have seen one before: the rivers were all suddenly full of them. It must have weighed a good 7lbs and was a very splendid salmon indeed. Goodness only knows if others made it into the many rivers of the Caucasus or went up the Danube or Don, Dneiper, Volga - you name them, a lot of rivers empty into the Black Sea. What has become of them since, I know not. So maybe this story is not so far fetched after all.
The format of the novel is also somewhat unconvincing; a series of diaries, memos, emails and interviews act as the narrative, but the language and description used at times seems false and unlikely given the context (especially during the interview sections). And there are passages that try just too hard to be funny, but are merely strained.
It isn`t a bad book – as I stated, I found it entertaining – but more conventional though it may be, the film adaptation engaged me more.
It's the first and last book I have read or will read by Paul Torday.
(It takes some time before the Prime Minister is named: here he is called Jay Vent, clearly standing for Tony Blair. His crude and smug spin doctor is here called Peter Maxwell. (Geddit?) The Iraq War is in progress. There will, quite late in the book, be a reference to “Operation Telic 2”, which, with the help of the Internet, enables us to locate the story in 2003.)
Of course Andrew, who enjoyed and knew all about salmon fishing himself, ridicules the idea: the conditions in the Yemen are totally unsuitable for such an undertaking; but when he is threatened with the sack if he refuses at least to explore how such a scheme might be realized, he reluctantly sets to work and comes up with how, at enormous expense, the things might be done.
The book consists of memos, reports, interviews, press items, emails, minutes of an enquiry, and especially extracts from Andrew’s diary, in which he comes a across as a scientist, a Humanist, a feminist, and occasionally, especially at the beginning of the book, as just a little prissy and Pooterish. He is very depressed because his marriage to a very ambitious wife is on the rocks.
He is introduced to Sheikh Muhammad on one of the latter’s visit to his mansion close by a salmon river near Inverness. The Sheikh is profoundly religious, and he sees salmon fishing as one activity in which members of all classes feel a sense of unity and peace: so he is doing Allah’s work by promoting it in the Arab world. He thought that if you have faith, everything is possible. He exudes a gentle charisma and makes everyone around him feel calm. Andrew’s view of the world will slowly be transformed by contact with the Sheikh and, later, by his experience among the devout Yemenis.
In the pages which follow, all kinds of snags appear. One of these is that, when the news of the project breaks, Al Qaeda wants the Sheikh eliminated.
Andrew is working with Harriet Chetwood-Talbot from the Land Agency which deals with the Sheikh’s affairs in Scotland and to which the Sheikh’s idea had been put forward in the first place. Part of the story is about the relationship between the two of them. She is engaged to Captain Robert Matthews who is in Iraq on so secret a mission that she cannot communicate with him.
Eventually Andrew and Harriet fly out to the Yemen (and Andrew’s diary describes the scenery there beautifully). They see the work being done on the project, and at last the day of the opening arrives. The Prime Minister and his spin doctor arrive. The Iraq War had become very unpopular; but the photoshoot of the ceremony should win over the votes of many of the four million anglers in the United Kingdom. What happened then is of course the dramatic climax of the novel.
At times the book sags a bit, with a certain amount of repetition. But the story, the satirical take on government, the character and reactions of Andrew, the knowledge of salmon fishing – all these are very enjoyable.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
If you're wondering why? This may not be Science Fiction, but there is certainly a lot of technology and science to keep a geek like me interested!
I have to admit, I saw the posters and the trailer for the film. However I had heard the name of the book, but as I normally only read Science Fiction, I ignored it. Shelving this fiction on the long bookshelf of stuff that I would get around to.
It hit my radar mainly with the casting of Ewan McGregor, and given his Star Wars credentials I am always inclined to give him a favourable look, and I have rarely been disappointed. So I was on Amazon and I bought the book.
It arrived and it had a nice feel to it with his blue cover and slim feel. I picked it up and read it pretty much in forty eight hours flat. Obviously life got in the way, there is a certain amount of cooking, tidying and finding someone's PE kit that even a great book can take you away from, but this one tried very hard.
Rereading the book this weekend, I can't really pinpoint when the book grabs you, but I was taken by Dr Alfred Jones from the start.
What kept me reading was the different chapters and the styles of writing, including diary entries, police interviews, extracts from Hansard (the official record of the Houses of PArliament), letters and emails. It felt like a lot of reading I fdo which is not fiction.
It felt like I had spent a long time on the internet diving into a bunch of different texts taking on nugget of information or another and piecing the story together for myself, like some amazingly satisfying jigsaw.
Dr Alfred Jones and his relationship with Mary was beautifully drawn, and contrasted carefully against harriet and her broken love affair.
I won't say much about the story, except say its excellent, and has gone on to my much loved list straight away.
The ending in the book is different to the film, in fact the film differs in several good ways,not least in the brilliant casting of Kristin Scott Thomas. So I can recommend the film as well.
The ending of the book is better, more open, much more thought-provoking and in the end, that is why it stays with you.
Also if you're wondering, this may not be Science Fiction, but there is certainly a lot of technology and science to keep a geek like me interested!
Enjoy!
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