Paul Torday’s first novel Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was published two years ago when he was 60. And the former engineer is clearly making up for lost time because hot on the heels of last year’s The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce comes this offering. If you’re in the mood for something captivating and clever but not terribly cheerful, boy, this is it.
Michael Gascoigne is a mind-numbing, well-to-do British bore plodding his way through a dreary existence with his equally dull wife Elizabeth. Early on in the book, thank goodness, a twist appears in the tale when Michael stops on the landing of a friend’s house to examine a woman in a green dress in a painting. Upon mentioning her to his hosts, he is told there is no such woman and when he returns to look at the painting, indeed she is gone. Not for good, however. It turns out there is a reason Michael is the person you would least like to sit next to at a dinner party. He’s long been on medication for a serious psychotic condition that may not be entirely unconnected to his earlier orphanhood, if you get my drift. The sighting of the girl in the green dress is the first indication that he has stopped taking his meds.
As his true self starts to emerge, he becomes a man you just might want to sit next to at a dinner party and Elizabeth finds herself coming to like him more and more although, frankly, she needs a good slap for marrying him in the first place. For a brief time, they enjoy a wonderful, warm connection but as time goes by and the woman in the green dress exerts more and more pressure, Michael goes from dull to dangerous.
If you actually ended up sitting next to Michael or Elizabeth at a dinner party you would feign a migraine and go home. But meeting them in Paul Torday’s clever book is a different matter. Part love story, part horror story, wholly riveting.
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