‘My dad left a lot to live up to’

Earlier this month, a rather strange literary event occurred: a new Paul Torday novel was published. To his fans, this would seem improbable, because the author died in December 2013, after becoming one of the more unlikely publishing sensations of the last decade. But how Torday’s final novel made it into print is a story that speaks eloquently of a restrained, English love between a father and his son.

The book, three-quarters finished when Torday died, has been completed by his eldest child, Piers, himself a children’s author, as a final tribute to his father. “There were moments when I thought, ‘Oh, I just don’t know if this is what he wanted’,” says Piers, explaining the difficulty of trying to mimic his father’s style and work out how to finish a book without an ending. “But I love what he had written, and I’m really proud of what I’ve done.”

The publication of “The Death of an Owl” is a curious coda to a remarkable literary career. Torday was the managing director of a successful marine engineering firm in Northumberland, and had never written a book until he was 59. His debut novel, “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen”, became one of the best-selling books of 2007, was picked up as one of the first “Richard & Judy” book club recommendations and turned into a Hollywood film starring Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt. What his readers did not know was that just months after “Salmon Fishing” came out, he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of kidney cancer.

Piers, 42, explains: “We went from this euphoria of the book and a publishing career beginning, to ‘how long have you got left to live?’. It really affected his physical health, and his confidence in, well, staying alive.” Remarkably, thanks to the drug Sunitinib, he survived for another six years and was able to publish seven more books. One person who was particularly affected by Torday’s miraculous change of career was his eldest son, Piers, who at the time was a producer in reality TV. He, like his father, had read English at Oxford, and he too had dreams of writing.

“It really took the wind out of my sails in both a pleasurable and a discombobulating way, because that was what I — at the back of my mind — had been thinking about doing,” Piers says. “It was mixed emotions. I was immensely proud of him, it was very exciting. But there I was, talking to my friends about writing a book, and my father, without any pomp had just done it, without telling a soul.”

But this was nothing as to digesting the news later that he had cancer. “It made me reflect very deeply: what if I leave doing what I want to do until the age of 60? My Dad’s got cancer, my grandfather died of cancer. There’s every chance that I might get something. Don’t hang around.”

So he booked himself on a week’s writing course. Eventually, he gave up his day job to publish “The Last Wild”, a dystopian children’s book with a cast of talking animals. It was a big hit, won various awards and became a trilogy that is now printed in 14 languages.

Father and son were never able to enjoy their joint successes fully. Just as “The Last Wild” was published, his father’s health started to deteriorate rapidly. “But he told me that, though he was very ill and was having various operations, he was writing a new book. It was fantastic. We thought: ‘It can’t be that bad if he was able to write a new book.’ It gave us such hope.”

“The Death of an Owl” is about a politician who inadvertently runs over a protected bird and then desperately tries to cover his tracks with a series of lies, which only exacerbate the original misdemeanour. It echoes the downfall of Chris Huhne, the former cabinet minister, and harks back to some of the humour in “Salmon Fishing”. “I kept on thinking, should I ask him what we should do if he doesn’t finish the book? But, of course, I couldn’t do that because it was one of the things that kept him going.”

When his father died, Piers presumed the unfinished book would go with him to the grave. His father, being archetypally upper-middle class, had been clinical in many aspects of his death — cancelling appearances at literary festivals, tidying up his will — but he never had an end-of-life conversation with his children. “He was very English. I absolutely wish we had had conversations where he said: ‘I want you to finish it, and this is how it should be.’ That didn’t happen because I loved my father very much, and I know he loved me very much, but we found it hard to verbalise that love in a way that a lot of sons and fathers do.”

About four months after he died, while helping to organise his memorial service, Paul’s agent called Piers and told him he should take a look at the manuscript, and consider completing it. Piers, slightly daunted, went to his father’s computer (passwords had been left neatly in a file) and see what state it was in. It finished mid-sentence on page 217 of what would become 274 pages. “I had this trauma because I found various files called ‘Death of an Owl synopsis’. But they were in various odd formats that I just couldn’t open.”

When he did finally crack into them, he found no more than a few sentences about the fate of the central character. “It was a bit of detective story. That sounds fun, and it was in its way, but I would have preferred it the other way — and have been left clear instructions.”

There have been plenty of authors who have finished other’s work, known in publishing jargon as continuations. Jane Austen’s unfinished romance “Sanditon” is a regular target, while others have taken on Charles Dickens’s final work, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”.

For his continuation, Piers says he didn’t need to consult experts for advice. “I looked into it, and then I realised I didn’t need to. Because he was my father. I knew this man all my life.”

Instead, he read and reread all his father’s novels to get his voice, and analysed how he ended his stories. But, ultimately, it all came down to guesswork: “I had all these imaginary conversations with my dad — ‘Did you want this?’ Some bits came easily, some bits I just didn’t know.”

Only after he handed in a completed manuscript did Paul’s agent admit to Piers that his father had left instructions that he wanted his son to finish the book. “Very wisely, she didn’t tell me until I’d done it. It meant that I finished the book because I wanted to, not because I felt I had to.”

And after having spent a year recreating his father’s voice, he says he is even more admiring of his writing, “his storytelling skills, his style, his restraint. I felt in awe. It’s like I have a lot to live up to sunshine.”

–The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2016