The desert is a sea of sand

In between marking first-year assignments on phonology and morphology (some people need to be very afraid), I managed to finish another book that I bought in my September shopping spree. Paul Torday's Salmon fishing in the Yemen took three baths and an hour on the futon to finish.

The book isn't written in a normal narrative style. I seem to have a sixth sense for picking up books that are slightly odd like that. This one is a collection of diary entries, e-mails, letters, interviews, interrogations and extracts from an unpublished autobiography. It makes for a very dynamic read, which is probably why it didn't take that long to read (although I do take very long baths and slightly lose track of time).

Main character in the book is Dr Alfred Jones of the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence. He lives for his work, has no social life to speak of apart from a loveless marriage of convenience, and is slightly detached from reality. Sounds familiar. He is approached by a Yemeni sheikh who is interested in introducing salmon into a wadi in (the)* Yemen. This is of course a ridiculous project but after the British government gets involved Jones is put under sufficient pressure that he does some feasibility studies. He gets more and more convinced that it can be done, and while the government – influenced by the sketchy communications officer at No 10 who sees electoral opportunities everywhere, a very dislikeable chap – get(s)** uninvolved and involved again, salmon is being introduced into the desert. It doesn't all go exactly according to plan, but oh well, and it supposedly shows that the sheikh was right that everything can be done if you believe in it enough.

I'm not sure that that is the lesson I'm supposed to learn from this. I guess it's one, the other one being that political spin doctors are evil – but we knew that already. Still, I'm kind of sad that I finished the book already, and I would have liked to see what would have happened to the salmon. (They got netted and eaten, but what would have happened to them if they had been allowed to do their business? Would they colonize the Indian Ocean and diverge into a separate subspecies? I am way too Dr Jonesy for my own good.)


* No article for me here.
** If this was a formal piece of writing, the s would be dropped.
Footnoting your own blog posts for linguistic variation is a bit sad.