Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday
I’ll start by noting that this satire, laid on thick as if with a cement mixer, is not funny. You get what it is trying to do within moments, within pages. And despite knowing what it’s trying to do, you don’t give it credit. You just wait for the inevitable to occur, and it does. And when it occurs, it does not make you laugh.
That’s not to say everything is doom and gloom and the rending of garments. You can always enjoy yourself, doing almost anything except eye surgery, if you want to have a good time. Everything’s worth reading, whether or not it succeeds. If it does not succeed, you have learnt something. Edison said that when he failed many dozens of times to make a fluorescent lightbulb, he had instead discovered over two hundred ways not to make one. Reading books that do not work, that fail, is an even better chance to learn. Because it is the other guy who risked it all and lost, who died on his literary arse, and not you. He bombed, but you can profit.
Some good things first. Formats are fun and the diary form is a good and trusty one. We love our diaries, don’t we, folks? (Only to read, though – not to write; diary writing is down, precipitously down, from pre- and postwar heights. I keep one. Have done so for years. I like it. But no one else I know does. Or it’s possible they don’t tell me. I wonder why?)
We know that formats are fun and the diary form and the other forms of emails and messages on answerphones and things like that, they’re fun too. But lesson one: you can go overboard with formats.
Lesson two: do not make your satire – an art form that does best when it is sprightly and light (tread lightly, Chesterton told us, tread lightly like the angels tread) – heavy and leaden and obvious. When you satirise one thing with something very much like it, and change the location by two or so countries over, you are not cleverly signposting anything. You’re telling the reader that you think they are stupid, so stupid they need directions done five inches high in crayon; and they might not like that very much.
Although of course, you mustn’t forget that the judges of literary prizes – being stupid themselves, and thinking readers are even stupider than they are – will love allegories hung on the creakiest of hinges. They will love work done with the heaviest, least dextrous of hands. So you may pick up one or two awards and citations, and even a few good notices in the press, in the mix. Cherish these, for they are your grandest and gravest rewards. They will guarantee another book contract, another opportunity – and hell, possibly a chance to improve, if you choose to take it.
Lesson three: make your characters live long in the memory, rather than being forgotten instantly, like the ones in this book were. Some of them you can remember in their vague shape, because they are so painfully, agonisingly, based on real people. Exaggerated caricatures of real people. But the others, the original ones the reader is meant to know and to care about and to want to see succeed, try to have them matter just a little. And do your best so their names are not gone from the mind the moment the reader closes the book and thinks about what might be happening for dinner.
Other than that, don’t forget to have fun! If you’re going to write a comedy without jokes, satire without bite, a novel without characters, all the while being showered with prizes, it really is important to have fun. After all, that’s all that counts in the end. Not readers, not the state of the art overall. The only thing that really matters is whether you had any fun doing it.
So get out there and write something. How hard can it be?