Paul Torday is that rarity in the publishing world: a late starter. In 2006, aged 59, he burst onto the writing scene with the surprise comic hit Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Now releasing his third book in as many years, The Girl on the Landing, is he making up for lost time, I wonder?
‘One does think of writers emerging a lot younger than 59, but I don’t think age is a particular bar in writing. I think in other professions it might be more of a hindrance: I can’t imagine suddenly emerging into acting at the age of 59 with a great deal of success, but other writers have succeeded later in life.’
He cites British novelist Mary Wesley as an example, a woman who published her first adult novel at 71; Alexander McCall Smith is another that springs to mind. However, both of these writers had previously dabbled in children’s fiction; Torday’s background was in engineering and industry. To this day, he remains a non-executive (‘I go in about one day a week’) on the board of his company in the northeast of England.
But perhaps this change in profession wasn’t so unexpected after all. Torday had dabbled in writing as a young literature student at Oxford University, where he even came into contact with J.R.R Tolkien, ‘who was then a sort of regis professor’, he explains. ‘He was extremely nice and very tolerant of bumptious undergraduates asking him questions. That was in 1966, long before Lord Of The Rings mania swept the planet, but even then he must have been bored of people asking him stupid questions about his books.’
However, Paul Torday’s latest novel draws far more upon the Victorian chillers of M.R. James than the sword and sandals fantasy of Middle Earth. It continues the author’s fascination with broken lives and features a typical Torday pairing in the passionless marriage of Michael and Elizabeth Gascoigne. He, a wealthy, decent, but boring relic of the British landed gentry; she, a journalist who feels that she has settled for less. But as the story unfolds, Michael’s personality begins to change. Prompted by a chance glimpse of the painting of a girl in a green dress, their entire relationship is turned on its head, and what emerges is part ghost story, part psychological thriller.
Interestingly enough, it didn’t start out this way: ‘The Girl on the Landing was going to be a much more lighthearted book,’ Torday explains. ‘I started out by wanting to write a ghost story, but it wandered around a bit and became a satire on ghost stories, so eventually I stopped and started again, and it became the book it is today. I became much more interested in exploring the area of the mind, between what was imagined and what was real; that’s what I wanted to write about.’
The author soon found himself drawn into the unfamiliar world of mental illness. ‘I needed to do a certain amount of research to make me feel reasonably comfortable with some of the terminology and states of mind I was going to describe. I bought a few books on mental illness and googled away, but I’m not a great believer in techno-writing, where the research overwhelms the story and you get into intense detail – when the writer gets so obsessed about knowing which gun fires which bullet that it almost overwhelms the story. I think research has to be used quite lightly. I hope that I’ve created a credible psychological thriller that makes people think about what is normal in human beings.’
There is little to link the three books of Paul Torday, other than an assured style and a penchant for broken individuals. But The Girl on the Landing is definitely a return to form, and finds it’s author in high spirits and enjoying his newfound profession. So after all this, there surely remains only one thing to ask: does the writer believe in ghosts?
‘I live in a house where the oldest parts of it are 14th century. It would be a very brave man who sat in my house and said, ‘I don’t believe in ghosts’, in a loud voice, in case something or someone came along and decided to teach him a lesson. So I never say I don’t believe in ghosts, I sort of shrug my shoulders. I guess the ending of The Girl on a Landing sort of expresses what I believe about them: that you can’t completely write them out of the script; they do tend to pop up again.’
Paul Torday’s The Girl on the Landing is available from Magrudy’s for Dhs85
