Book review: More than you can say by Paul Torday

Published on Monday 7 February 2011 12:12

More Than You Can Say by Paul Torday Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 280pp, £12.99

The drive of John Buchan pervades this story. Its author, Paul Torday -- no slouch when it comes to propelling a narrative - quotes from Buchan's The Three Hostages in his epigraph: "Of course people will say … that a meritorious soldier, more notable perhaps for courage than for brains, has gone crazy, and they will comment on the long-drawn-out effects of the War."

Torday's hero - more impetuous than smart - is Richard Gaunt, a former soldier whose name is charged with Buchanesque resonance. Gaunt has seen action in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has watched men die, witnessed a suicide bombing and taken human life. Bruised and scarred, and forged in combat, Gaunt is cast as Torday's narrator, the reader's sole guide through 280 pages of bumpy, zig-zag action and tortured emotion, dabbling discursively at times in the pros and cons, the whys and wherefores of Britain's dalliance in the mess of war in the Gulf. Just how reliable, you wonder, can he be?

The essential story he tells is a simple, highly improbable one in which Gaunt is cast as action-man, falls for a girl, then discovers that all is not as it seems. The story is peopled with dupes and villains, spies and playboys, set largely in London, with flashbacks to shady derring-do in Basra and Kabul. This narrative focus is the crucible of the novel, its muscle and sinew. The girl Gaunt falls for is an irresistible cypher, at times a mouthpiece for the politics of rejection of Britain's meddling abroad. She is supposed to be from Afghanistan. She is blonde, white-skinned, an enigma.

The other story - the inessential one - is a bid on the part of Torday to give the novel emotional grist and a layer of psychological depth. In it Gaunt reprises his long-time affair with the beautiful, decent Emma, an English rose, ever faithful while Gaunt is abroad. She agrees to marry him on his return. It doesn't happen. They buy a restaurant together (using Emma's capital), Emma carrying most of the burden.

Both the relationship and business hit the skids. "My friends think you're just using me," Emma erupts. "You live in my flat, you get free meals and drinks at the restaurant, and you get me. All for nothing." Gaunt's betrayal of Emma's loyalty is compounded when he cheats with one of the waitresses. Torday imbues him with token remorse, but the impact is muted, and, since Emma is so thinly sketched, the reader too finds it hard to connect.

The Emma episodes lend Gaunt a back-story, while the foreground is devoted to cut and thrust, with Gaunt the hero, finding and losing jobs, gambling at a gentlemen's club in Mayfair. One night he is offered double or quits on 3,000.All he need do is walk to Oxford by lunchtime next day.

Departing in evening attire, walking briskly, Gaunt at dawn is hit by a Range Rover, and kidnapped. Thus the action tale kicks in. Its ludicrous pretext - a debonair Pashtun, Mr Khan, wants Gaunt to marry the beautiful Afghan woman at once, for a no-questions-asked 10,000 - is the stuff of farce. The subsequent action bristles with echoes of every hero from Bulldog Drummond through Richard Hannay to 007. It seems the young woman - sultry, stunning, and reluctant - has little option but to comply. As Mrs Gaunt, her British passport will be secured. Gaunt, 10,000 the richer, may then vamoose.

But our gallant hero is having none of it. Honour-bound to the new Mrs Gaunt, he attempts to save her from Khan - or so he thinks. Soon Gaunt is knee-deep in British agents and linked to a plot to kill the president of Afghanistan in London. Mrs Gaunt, meanwhile, is up to her neck in the slick of disturbing events.

Torday keeps the story moving and tightly knit; he writes in detailed (sometimes too detailed), engaging prose. The questions raised - about our treatment of soldiers returning from flashpoints of conflict; or the matter of British involvement in foreign wars - are drowned by the loud, ever-pounding heartbeat of Gaunt at full tilt as he assaults the fiction best-seller list.

Shaken but - naturally - not stirred.