Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

The best you can say about this book by Paul Torday is that it’s entertaining; the worst is that it’s silly, or if you chose to be harsh, nonsensical. It’s about a British professor who is pushed into investigating the possibility of putting salmon into the wadis in the Yemen. He gets interested in the idea which results in him falling for a young woman who is also involved, realising his marriage and his work are farcical and that maybe there’s more to life than what he has. It’s all written in email or letter form, which is fairly irritating – it’s a style rarely done well – and while it’s supposed to be satirical, it comes across as simply silly. Most annoying of all is that the author, while he’d protest it’s just supposed to be entertainment, has tried to put across some deep ideas in the most shallow way possible – ironic, because the deep ideas are about how shallow politicians are. They may be, but it’s pretty obvious a lot of novelists are no better.