According to Stephen Holden’s review in the Times, Lasse Hallström’s lovely new movie, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is based on an “absurdist” novel by Paul Torday, a late bloomer who has written a clutch of novels in the past couple of years. I was shocked to read this, because even though the adaptation does begin with a lot of giggling and spluttering about the absurdity of setting up a salmon-fishing operation anywhere in the Arabian Peninsula, it swiftly moves into deeply romantic territory, with a Disney-spectacular buildup to the exulting sight of a large fish jumping high out of the water. By this point, nobody has been laughing for some time. By the end of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, I’d completely forgotten how funny it was at the start.

Mr Holden writes,

Whether Harriet and Fred will get together is a question that hovers over the movie. The appeal of the film depends on the charm of Mr. McGregor and Ms. Blunt, whose polite but discreetly charged connection is the story’s emotional center.

Well, yeah. Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt engage in some very old-fashioned movie magic here. This is not one of those stories about Brits who are too buttoned-up to make easy connections. For one thing, Mr McGregor plays a Scotsman, Alfred Jones (it’s nice to hear him speak his native tongue), who is not at all shy. For the other, Ms Blunt’s character, Harriet Chetwold-Talbot, is attached to a military officer who goes missing in Afghanistan, and Ms Blunt makes you feel what she’s going through as she worries about him. The salmon project, conceived by a wealthy sheik, brings Alfred and Harriet together, and it’s immediately clear that they are both very kind and decent people. What’s more, this kindness and decency are invigorating for both of them — certainly for Alfred, who is inspired to reconsider his stale marriage to a banker who has slipped into a habit of belittling him. How do we get from kindness and decency to romance? That’s where the magic comes in. The actors know that no one is going to question their characters’ falling in love if they show them falling in love, and Ms Blunt and Mr McGregor are more than equal to the challenge. As Mr Holden notes, you’re not sure until the last minute that the colleagues will become a couple, owing to prior commitments, but a fondness of Shakespearean charm is so well established by the middle of the movie that it almost doesn’t matter how they end up.

Did I say something about no laughing? Kristin Scott Thomas, as the Prime Minister’s press secretary, unfurls her best dragon suit and incinerates the fools who make her suffer. Is there a more cynical walk of life than that of the press secretary? We begin by laughing, but soon we simply beam: it’s impossible to settle on whether the shameless press secretary is funnier than Ms Scott Thomas playing the shameless press secretary. You’re glad that she’s not the Prime Minister, though; she’d undoubtedly be provoked to launch a few nukes by sheer unmanageable exasperation with human feebleness.

I want to note that the actor who plays the sheik, Amr Waked, does a magnificent job with what might have been an insufferable role, bringing fresh moves to a stock character.  

***

The weather has warmed up, so I ran Wednesday’s errands, such as they were, today; on Wednesday itself, I’ll be at the hospital, for the entire afternoon, doing the Remicade rag. In addition to the errands, I thought that I’d go to the Shake Shack, so I packed an old cloth napkin and headed up the street. The line was longish and not moving, so I ran the errands and came back; the line was just as long but it was moving. I pulled out a recent, not the latest, New York Review of Books, and read Elaine Blair on Michel Houellebecq.

Before Les particules élémentaires even came out in English, I had a copy of the original, one of the first books that I bought from abroad on the Internet. I read perhaps forty or fifty pages before putting it down. Not only was it unpleasant, it was boring. Horribly, horribly boring. Thereafter, I kept up with the reviews of Houellebecq’s new books, but was never tempted to buy one. Everything about the man and his work seemed disagreeable, without being interesting. Eventually, I stopped reading the reviews as well. I was drawn to Elaine Blair’s review of The Map and the Territory because the NYRB cover headline announced that “Houellebecq Goes Off Sex.” What, then?

I read the piece at the Shake Shack, and it was in the middle of a sumptuous double Shackburger that I had the added satisfaction of reading this:

Houellebecq likes to scorn the idea of individual personality, which to him is all a matter of minor differences. … In writing about love, it would be precious and boring, from Houellebecq’s point of view, to go on about her unique qualities and his unique qualities and the subtle ways in which all of their qualities draw them together and pull them apart. There is an element of expediency in this position, for Houellebecq has no apparent ability to conceive of different personalities with unique qualities. He is a novelist with only one character in him.

So it wasn’t the sex that turned me off, or not just the sex. It was the sheer tedium of following a solitary character pace in the cage of his unimaginative consciousness.

There’s something almost as good later on; by this time, sadly, there was nothing left but my chocolate shake. “The [new] novel affects the reader like a glamorous advertisement for work; it mightmake one want to work, but obscurely, and not at the real-life tasks that one is supposed to be doing.” Actually, that’s better, because it’s not really about Houellebecq; it’s about the alternative world of advertising, in which the idea of effort is annihilated by great design, and we see ourselves in states of being that do not involve actual doing. It’s like the vision that Levenger catalogues invariably produce: You see yourself in a café, writing a novel by hand. As you fill the pages of a cunning notebook, ink flows from your exceptional pen with the consistency of mayonnaise.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2012 at 9:58 am.