Paul Torday’s phenomenal success with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was always going to be a hard act to follow.
Paul Torday’s phenomenal success with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was always going to be a hard act to follow. The idea of it was the thing — a wonderfully funny, mad idea, carried out economically in an epistolary style that rushed along from start to finish in a single fluid motion.
‘When once you have thought of big men and little men,’ a curmudgeonly Johnson said of Gulliver’s Travels, ‘it is very easy to do all the rest,’ but Salmon Fishing in the Yemen showed just how crucial that good idea is. Torday’s new novel, More Than You Can Say, at its outset, seems to offer the same kind of treat. Its hero, Richard Gaunt, ex-soldier, ex-restaurateur, ex-lover, unemployable and volatile, has an unusual run of luck at the card table and accepts a double or quits bet that, setting out at 2 a.m.,
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