Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

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One part of the ending came as a shock but the other I must confess I thought I saw coming although it was kind of sad when it did. With the British government desperate for a good news story in the area, the Prime Minister's fearsome spokesperson, Patricia Maxwell seizes on the idea and makes Fred responsible for the success of the project. The scheme picks up momentum and Dr Jones is the only character who knows how it might actually be achieved.

Salmon Fishing In The Yemen: Torday, Paul: 9780156034562

For the first three-quarters of the film, it stayed faithful to the book, and I even recognised some of the dialogue.

The formula successfully diluted the book’s central message of having faith and following your dream, but acknowledges that dreams can be shattered. T)he intelligence, inventiveness and humanity of this novel in comparison to the usual run of literary fiction is as wild salmon to the farmed. Jones winds up working mainly for Harriet Chetwode-Talbot, who is handling the running of the project for the Sheikh. Responsibility for its success falls on the Pooterish shoulders of Alfred Jones, fisheries scientist, henpecked husband (Mrs Jones is not so much hen as pterodactyl) and author of a groundbreaking study on mussel populations.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen - Paul Torday - Complete Review Salmon Fishing in the Yemen - Paul Torday - Complete Review

Casting off his deep-set cynicism, Fred rises to the Sheikh's eccentric challenge: to go on a journey of self discovery and late blooming love. This provides succour to him in a most crucial period of his life, when his wife is away in Geneva pursuing a financial career more lucrative than his own, and his marriage is almost on the rocks. A book that doesn't make fishing seem boring that is also shot through with tenderness and political insight. There some good bits and the shallow PR adviser to the PM was a fav but overall it has lost its edginess over time.

Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, who gave the film two out of five stars, wrote that it "feels as if you've seen it many times before".

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (novel) - Wikipedia

Being a very British film, the makers undoubtedly wanted to have a character that wasn’t a remake of the foul Malcolm Tucker from the BBC’s brilliant political satire In The Thick Of It.I went to see the film Salmon Fishing in the Yemen this afternoon based on the brilliant 2006 book by Paul Torday. Diary entries, correspondence and answers to interview questions are all just thinly disguised narrative. Just as Torday uses so many different forms in presenting the story -- from diary entries to a TV script -- so too he seems uncertain of what he means the book to be.