A couple of drifters

Paul Torday was 59 when his first novel, the highly acclaimed Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, was published in 2006. Since then, he can barely have stepped away from his keyboard. The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers is his fourth novel and it represents a return to the comic tone of Salmon Fishing.

Or at least it does in part. There are scenes of high comedy here, but some pretty dark swirls too. And hanging over the whole book is the question of what makes for a fulfilled life. The narrator, Hector Chetwode-Talbot — known, mercifully as ‘Eck’ — is a former soldier who has drifted into the City. He is, as he says of himself, ‘a minor character, a walk-on part’, whose duties consist principally of taking rich clients out to lunch and promising to make them even richer by investing in his firm’s Styx Fund.

As this is the turn of the century with the City awash with money, these promises are not hard to keep. On holiday in the south of France, Eck meets Charlie Summers, a man who resembles him so closely he could be his older brother. Charlie has spent his life bumping along the bottom, from one hopeless scheme to another. His latest plan, he explains excitedly, is to flog a Japanese dogfood of deeply uncertain provenance called Yoruza.

Back in England, their paths cross again. Charlie by now calling himself a ‘dog-nutritionist’, is selling Yoruza by the sackload — despite its having ‘a powerful emetic effect’ on any dog unwise enough to touch it. While Eck is troubled by a persistent sense of not having any purpose in life, Charlie, his cheery doppelgänger, bumbles blithely on, living from moment to moment.