Catching up with a few recent books still. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was the Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago – you can’t miss the sticker on the cover telling you as much. The author, Paul Torday, also popped up on the Simon Mayo book segment a couple of weeks ago to plug this book too.
The plot is simple if mad. The much put-upon Alfred Jones works for a government fisheries department. One day he’s asked if it’d be possible to breed Salmon in the Yemen. He laughs it off, but political willpower being what it is – lots of bad news coming from the Middle East – that government mandarins begin to see the “strengths” of the idea, and he’s politely asked to get on with it and do the impossible.
The story is told in a series of diary entries, interviews, letters, interviews and even extracts from Hansard. It’s silly, it’s playful, it’s sad and it’s happy.
I really enjoyed this story, and you simply don’t know quite what’s going to happen despite even the least fish-aware person realising that salmon, as a rule, prefer the climes of the North Atlantic as opposed to those of the Middle East.
How could you not like a book called Salmon Fishing in the Yemen?