SOMETIMES A NOVELIST’S progress to publication is a story in itself. Sometimes the journey you make to speak to him or her is as diverting as good fiction. In the peculiar case of Paul Torday, a first-timer at 60, both these elements are firmly in place, so off I go to the far side of Hadrian’s Wall, the top right arrowhead of England where towns and villages stand to the north of Scotland.

Here is the great emptiness at the edge of (Roman) empire, the old debatable lands, raids and reivers, blind keeps and families that go back unbroken for a thousand years. And here now is the unbelievable Jacobean front of Chipchase Castle, built around a well-preserved tower of 600 years, a cliff of local stone with much later cosmetic windows.

Out in the front drive is a shoot comprising a dozen confident figures in waxy jackets. Their faces brim with the sheer joy of town wealth buying a day of country pleasure. They say “Hi, Paul” as he passes into the castle, and he acknowledges each of them dutifully. This is a Grade I* listed building, which means you can be banished to the colonies for a window box. It has been in the family of Penelope, his second wife, for 150 years, and this shooting revenue helps with the upkeep. As will the income from the new career and his much trumpeted novel, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.

The title sounds like a trend-surf-ing one, bearing in mind not only Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, but also that author’s endorsement for Torday's book on its cover. This must be syn-chronicity at work since he insists that he was not aware of Lewycka’s book until after he had completed — and named — his own. Indeed, he says, he was anxious that people might sniff a borrowing in the catchy formula of whimsy and bathos.

Up in the old servants’ quarters — easier to heat — he describes the unorthodox moment at which the idea for the book struck him. It happened, as these things will, at a conference on the improvement of the environ-mental quality of English rivers. “A scientist said something about ‘in-stream organisms such as migratory salmonids’, and it took me some time to realise he meant salmon.” From here, he explains, came the notion of a (fictional) fisheries scientist who is suddenly required to head a project for the introduction of salmon into the dry river beds of Yemen.

How the fazed but dogged Dr Frederick Jones, of the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence, goes about achieving such a miracle for the bottomlessly wealthy Sheikh Muhammad ibn Zaidi bani Tihama becomes the stuff of this seriously good comedy. So too does Torday’s own meticulous dismantling of just about every argument — and there are even more than you imagined — against the likelihood of seeing a single salmon, indigenous or imported, in the vicinity of the Middle Eastern country, part of which was better known to the British as Aden.

Why the interest in fishing? This is a question that barely needs asking since the answer lies in the landscape of rivers and burns surrounding Chipchase, particularly in the North Tyne that bows round the edge of the grounds before carrying on to meet its South counterpart just west of Hexham. In the book, however, fishing becomes a metaphor for spiritual aspiration, and makes reflective a story that starts out as a satire on the relationship between private initiative and government committee. In that the style is a fast-moving torrent of briefing documents and surprising love, of tracts and attraction, Torday does indeed plough a similar stylistic furrow to that of Lewycka and her tractors.

He is downloading from life. For the past 35 years and more he has worked in industries related to marine engineering. This means that where many another fiction writer might say: “Then I decided to cut down on the teaching and try my hand at short stories,” he is saying: “Then I bought a business in Durham, with friends, making products that measured the flow of oil and gas.” Before this he was part of the family business, having joined in his mid-twenties after the death of his mother in a car crash in Kenya.

Wind the clock back still further and you realise that these three and a half decades have been a sort of huge gap period for business, book-ended by literary pursuit; for it turns out that he was an English literature student at Oxford in the late 1960s. His college was Pembroke and he can remember interrogating an elderly and “very patient” J. R. R. Tolkien on the true meaning of The Lord of the Rings.

After Oxford he made what can only be described as a minority move for former students of Beowulf by taking a diploma in management science at Manchester. He remembers going back to Oxford for a gaudy (reunion), where a former tutor observed, as prewar snobs might have, that Torday had gone into trade. “But he did say it in quotation marks!” Matter-of-factly, and with impeccable modesty, he reveals that he had always had in common with many English graduates the wish to write. “Occasionally, one reads books and thinks, ‘I’d love to have written that’. But I’m afraid I have tended to lurk in the thickets of Trollope, Dickens and Thackeray, and so when people ask me what I am reading, I don’t tend to come up with the right answers.

“One of the reasons I wrote this particular book was the great sense of discomfort I had about the Middle East, in particular our [the West’s] perception of it. I’m using that phrase now, the Middle East, but of course it is a region with many different countries. In the past 15 years or so my wife and I have been there many times, mainly in Oman. And obviously I have used that for my descriptions of places and conditions. Why didn’t I call the book Salmon Fishing in the Oman? I think I thought it just didn’t sound as good as in ‘the Yemen’.

“Anyway, after 9/11 it vexed me to see all those really quite prejudiced articles about Islamism. There are some very stable and devout societies in the Middle East which are being overlooked. The other thing that gave me the idea for writing the book as I did was . . .”

He pauses watchfully, as well he might, given the influence he is about to cite. “. . . the Hutton report. I thought a pastiche of that style would be rather a good way forward.”

Towards the end of his time as an unpublished novelist he did have many things in common with the rest of that species. First, he had already written two that hadn’t worked. One was an attempt at a thriller; the other was so much about the North East, where he had grown up, that people were bound to recognise themselves.

It would have been hugely embarrassing socially. Secondly, he had bought The Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. He sent Salmon Fishing to a publisher who politely declined but recommended an agent, a north-of-the-bor-der one, Mark Stanton.

“Then nothing happened, and I thought, ‘Oh, well, I’ve tried three times’. I’d just bought a second business in Newcastle when Stan rang me up and said there just might be the germ of something. After it had been edited, he sent it off to six or seven publishers and, rather cleverly I think, created a bit of an auction.” Torday got a two-book deal and a £250,000 advance. On the table as he speaks is clear evidence of the second novel, in the form of a foolscap manuscript. It concerns addiction, or more specifically “a man drinking himself to death on extremely expensive claret”. For this one there are no signs of lived research. Still, he does say guardedly that “most people’s lives have been shadowed by someone somewhere . . .” Bordeaux is the working title. If it takes after Salmon Fishing, then it will be well engineered, and with a certain forensic approach towards a proposition that could well be a byproduct of his first career.

One last question as we head back down towards Hexham, past members of the shoot with a slightly lost aspect about them. Could you really create a salmon run in the scorching desert? Torday looks about to say “No”, but then checks himself. “Someone would probably write in and say there’s one already.” He then says that he’s pretty sure there is a ski slope in Dubai, and he turns out to be absolutely right.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen will be BB Radio 4’s Book of the Week starting on Monday February 12

Extract

Proposal submitted by Dr Alfred Jones of the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence (NCFE) to Fitzharris & Price, 28 June

Executive Summary

NCFE has been invited to advise and comment to Fitzharris & Price on the feasibility of introducing migratory salmonids into the wadi systems of the Yemen. The longer-term objective is to develop opportunities for good-quality angling tourism in the country. The Arabian peninsula has a rich natural fishery offshore which is harvested by all of the Gulf States. Fishery exploitation and, increasingly, good fisheries management is well understood in the region. However, to date, angling for sport has not been accessible to most of the population. This could in theory change, if migratory fish such as salmon could be introduced into the river system. The proposal in this instance is to introduce salmon into the Wadi Aleyn in the western Yemen, as a pilot project. The longer-term objective is to develop a managed salmon fishery in this wadi, and subsequently in other watercourses where the right conditions can be found, or created. It is accepted that the Yemen is, in many respects, not the ideal environment into which to introduce migratory fish whose natural breeding habitat is the northern edge of the temperate zone and whose feeding grounds are in the North Atlantic. Some obvious problems include:

- Watercourses go from dry to spare conditions for relatively short periods of time and then only in the wet summer months in those parts of the Yemen which experience monsoon weather.

- Mean average air temperatures indicate that water temperatures are likely to be significantly higher than those tolerated by the species Salmo salar without developing stress.

- The migratory journey of the salmon, assuming the upper watercourse could be seeded with juvenile fish in the wet season, would be somewhat more challenging than its normal journey to the North Atlantic, being several thousand miles longer and involving a journey around the Cape of Good Hope and up the west coast of Africa before entering waters where salmon are normally found. The previous southern limit of the Atlantic salmon is the Bay of Biscay, and the southern limit of the northern Pacific salmon is Northern California.

- Once the rains end in September, conditions in the watercourses would become dry and hot and it is unlikely any salmon still resident in the system would survive.

SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN by Paul Torday

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99; 252pp £10.99 (free p&p) 0870 1608080 timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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