Walking wounded

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., he can walk from Mayfair to Oxford in time for lunch at the Randolph.

This is an engaging start, but the walk, as it turns out, is not the story. Some distance short of his destination Richard is kidnapped and taken, James Bond fashion, to a sumptuous country house where a suave Afghan, with impeccable manners and a superlative chef, makes him a dubious offer which he hasn’t the wit to refuse. This hors d’oeuvre sets the scene for the action to follow — sinister ‘heavies’, a mysterious Afghan blonde descended from Iskander’s conquering army, secret service, terrorists — a racy narrative of stock characters inhabiting a black-and-white world of good and bad.

The novel has its heart, however, in the grey spaces in between this story.