The Death of an Owl

by Paul Torday, Piers Torday

Genres: Humor & Satire; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Brought up in Switzerland, the only son of well-to-do parents, Charles Fryerne is somewhat unprepared for the world he meets when he goes up to Oxford University in the early 1980s. There he meets a fascinating social set, including a stellar young playwright, a student dubbed 'the future leader of the Conservative party' and a mercurial figure with ambitions to become the youngest prime minister since Pitt.

When they leave university, the characters go their separate ways. But as Charles's career as a journalist takes off, he finds himself once more in their orbit and observes at first hand the price of ambition, and the inner workings of the political machine. And when the country's future leader accidentally hits an owl on a country road, there are difficult choices to be made...

Death Of an Owl is a satire on political expediency and spin from the author of Salmon Fishing In the Yemen.

(p) 2016 Orion Publishing Group

Release date: April 14, 2016

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

‘Paul Torday’s debut novel is about an impossibility … And the remarkable thing is that a book about so deeply serious a matter can make you laugh, all the way to a last twist that’s as sudden and shocking as a barbed hook … As with all good comedy, there’s a tragic underside … And there is satire … To write a novel lampooning the looking-glass world of Blairite government must have given Torday as much gruesome fun as he gives his readers … Salmon Fishing is extraordinary indeed, and a triumph’

Guardian

‘[A] tender hearted book … [and a] thoroughly enjoyable debut’

Sunday Times

‘Captivates the grumpiest reader within moments … if you imagine The Office crossed with Yes, Minister, you may get some inkling of how very funny it is … the intelligence, inventiveness and humanity of this novel in comparison to the usual run of literary fiction is as wild salmon to the farmed’

Daily Telegraph

‘This is a book of considerable charm, an echo-chamber of a dozen different voices adroitly ventriloquized … [it’s] a moral tale about the importance of believing in something and the comparative importance of everything else’

Independent

‘This highly original novel blends satire with gentle humanity in a tale of what happens when idealism meets self-serving politics and bungling bureaucracy … A stunning debut’

Daily Mail

‘Grows more and more poignant as the novel progresses … satisfyingly full-bodied and slips down a treat’

Sunday Times

‘He has a good feeling for character and a sly sense of humour’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Torday’s confidence in his story’s power to command attention is not misplaced. Wilberforce is well worth sampling’

Independent on Sunday

‘A heart-wrenching tale of alcoholism and a lonely man’s search for identity … a mesmerising page-turner’

Mail on Sunday

‘Torday pulls it off magnificently … a clever, gripping novel’

The Times

‘The finale is terrifying, harking back to old-fashioned ghost stories, but with a modern, plausible twist – it stood the hairs of my arms on end’

Daily Telegraph

‘His prose remains anything but safe. It is supple, skilful and literary … this is a fabulously good yarn’

Observer

‘It seems Paul Torday can do no wrong. The Girl on the Landing is his third book and destined to do as well as the other two’

Daily Express

‘The certainties of the imperial world in which Buchan’s heroes operated have long gone, but Torday shows that today’s more ambivalent realities can also be pressed into service to produce intelligent and readable adventure stories’

Sunday Times

‘A Buchan-like set-up that pitches Gaunt into thriller territory … It’s a brave stylistic gamble’

Daily Mail

‘There are good reasons why Torday has found success, as this novel shows. There’s real substance to the characterisation … a keenness to incorporate the dark and the serious … and to engage with contemporary politics and issues. Above all, there’s his desire to entertain and to keep his readers turning those pages’

Guardian

‘Torday’s prose whips along in this involving, enjoyable novel’

Vogue

‘Charlie is a wonderful creation, at once sad and heroic, whose search for redemption attains real pathos at the end of this affecting, skilfully crafted novel’

Financial Times

‘Brilliantly and sympathetically drawn … this wonderfully written, clever book does not miss a single trick’

Daily Mail

‘Shades of both Greene and Ambler here, both in the crispness of the exposition and the marrying of humour with something close to tragedy’

Spectator

‘More intriguing is the skein of darkness that, in common with much of Torday’s fiction, runs discretely through the story – one sequence is sufficiently macabre as to recall the work of a young McEwan’

Literary Review

‘This is a novel about decay and destruction, but bracingly unsentimental and surprisingly moving’

Guardian

‘A gloriously enjoyable wallow of a read’

Daily Mail

‘It’s a novel that should enhance his reputation for excellent, ingenious writing’

Metro

‘A well-crafted novel … there is momentum, and there is excitement’

Spectator

‘[Torday] has blended some excellent social satire and even a dollop of the supernatural … this is an excellent mash-up, well-written, well-crafted and constantly gripping’

Daily Mail

‘Tautly written, the tone acid and angry’

Evening Standard

‘Paul Torday switches water for woodlands in Light Shining in the Forest, a tale of missing minors’

Vogue

‘[A] grippingly dark thriller … Great writing from a master storyteller’

Red Magazine

I grew up thinking my father ran an engineering business. Naturally, I rebelled by harbouring dreams of becoming an actor or writer. This modified into becoming a producer, first in theatre then in television. I made other people’s stories. But after about a decade, I’d had enough. I wanted something else. Which was when Dad dropped the bombshell … He had been writing a book all along. Not just any book either, but the publishing and film sensation that was Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.

I was immensely proud, and this gave me the confidence to undertake a creative writing course. It took a while, but four years later, I had published a book too – The Last Wild – the first in a trilogy about a boy trying to keep the last animals in the world alive.

Sadly, during that time, Dad had more dramatic but less cheering news – a diagnosis of stage-three kidney cancer. Miraculous drugs gave him another six years, and eight more wonderful books.

In the last year of his life – not that he knew that – he began writing his ninth book, called The Death of an Owl. It was, he told me, about a man who couldn’t help but tell the truth, and how that played out when he gets involved in a scandal involving a politician who runs over an owl by mistake …

He really wanted to finish the novel. I know it was a lifeline for him when things got bad. But by the final weeks, it became clear he was not going to. Even so, he was still making notes until a few days before he died. We never talked much about what would happen to the book. There were more important things to discuss.

A few months after Dad’s death, I began the process of going through his papers. I found the manuscript. Everyone – family, his agent, his editor – of course wanted to know what it was like. I knew he had been anxious that the painkilling drugs had addled his mind and that this would be evident in the story. I was relieved and delighted to find the opposite – a book that combined the political wit and perception of Salmon Fishing with the unsettling gothic tone he had made his own in Girl on the Landing.

I was gripped.

But it wasn’t finished. It stopped mid-sentence at a key point.

I dearly wanted to find out what was going to happen next. But Dad was no longer around to tell me. There was only one thing for it. I was going to have to make it up myself …

Piers Torday

London, 2016

As we bent our heads in prayer I glanced down and saw that beads of dew, left by the wet grass at the side of the churchyard path, where I had strayed for a moment to look at an old tombstone, glistened on my polished black shoes. The shoes were new; as was the dark grey suit I now wore, purchased in anticipation of my going up to Oxford in a few months’ time. The decision to buy the suit had been brought forward a little due to the importance of the occasion: the memorial service for my Uncle Roland.

Roland Fryerne was my father’s older brother. From this day on, my father would become head of our rather eccentric and dispersed family. If he chose to, he would be entitled to call himself ‘Charles Fryerne of Fryerne Court’: a feudal title dating back to the fifteenth century to which the family – if nobody else – attached great importance. Roland, genealogist and historian, had been cremated earlier in the day. The urn containing his ashes, no doubt still warm, nestled on a table garlanded with lilies, whose heavy scent filled the church. I felt no particular grief at my uncle’s death. I had hardly known him, as we had lived abroad for many years. My uncle had visited us once in New York, when I was all too young to remember, and half a dozen times in Lausanne, where we had lived for most of my life so far. He had not been at ease with children; or perhaps I had not been at ease with uncles.

Now my father’s employers had transferred him to a position in Head Office in west London. ‘Putting me out to grass,’ my father told my mother. At the time I had no idea what the phrase meant, but I was captivated by the idea of my father standing in a paddock and kneeling down now and then to munch the fresh pasture. I could see his grey head and his broad pinstriped back directly in front of me now. My elderly mother stood beside him, wearing a formal high-necked dress of midnight blue. If you met my parents for the first time you would judge them as elegant if somewhat chilly, and I am not sure that further acquaintance would have modified this impression. They were very private. They had none of the bonhomie that some expatriates displayed on returning home to England – a form of insecurity as the newcomers struggled to rediscover their place in the social order, unconscious of the fact that ‘society’ was changing so fast they might as well have just stepped out of a time machine.

My father always took a perverse pride in describing his line as late developers, of which I was a prime example, not having been born until both my parents were well into their forties. They had been slow to marry, late to parenthood and now it seemed doubtful whether they would make anything of their retirement. But they were Fryernes and therefore had long ago chosen obscurity over insecurity as their distinguishing feature.

In Lausanne we had lived quietly, but all my parents’ friends were comfortably off and so, I assumed, were we. Their social circle consisted of bankers, diplomats, or senior employees of organisations such as the United Nations and the Red Cross. Not merely a late child but an only one, the much older children of these professionals were my few friends; their mothers were my mother’s friends. Cocktail parties and dinners were infrequent and discreet. Dances were occasionally arranged for the younger generation – evenings of extreme dullness and great propriety.

Amongst the three of us, though, we had fun whenever my father had some time off. Long walks in the hills above Evian in the early summer, amongst the alpine flowers and the remainder of that year’s snow; sailing on Lake Geneva where we kept a small boat in one of the marinas; weeks spent in a rented villa in Menton, on the Côte d’Azur; and of course, skiing once the snow came.

I was already missing the shores of Lake Geneva. What I had seen of England so far did not encourage me to think life in west London would be much of a substitute for the life I had left behind. The prospect of going to university and mingling with a host of people who had all been at school together did not appeal either. I could speak three languages already, and the International Lycée I had attended had given me as good an education as you could wish for, but nobody I knew was going to Oxford. Those of my friends and contemporaries who had felt the need for further education had obtained places at Harvard, Princeton, the Sorbonne, Padua, Tübingen – even Cambridge. Already they resembled embryos of the successful Eurocrats or bankers they would no doubt one day become. If I was an embryo of anything, I didn’t have any idea what it might be. I didn’t really know what I believed in and I faced the future with a certain sense of dread.

The memorial service drew to a close. We shuffled out of our pews and processed behind the vicar out into the fresh air. I was standing beside my mother and, unaccountably, took her hand. ‘Don’t cling,’ she said, but not unkindly. I let go. The congregation had broken up into small groups who were chatting and enjoying the autumn sunshine after the chilly gloom of the church interior. I turned and studied the view around me. A suburban road separated two very different worlds. Behind me was the ancient church of St Mary’s-Without, a building of Norman origin, set in its own island of green and bounded by a copse of trees. A different landscape lay on the opposite side. I had seen the sign on our arrival: the road was called Fryerne Way. Behind me I heard my father say, ‘And that is Fryerne Court Estate.’

I turned and recognised Bradford Fryerne, a distant American cousin who appeared able to drop everything and cross the Atlantic at a moment’s notice in order to attend family gatherings of this kind. He had been a near neighbour in New York.

‘Wow,’ he said.

I gazed at the rows of detached houses, each with its own pocket-handkerchief-size front garden, off-road parking and garage. The few cars that were parked there at this time of day all seemed new or nearly new: Rovers, Jaguars and the occasional sports car. I could see nothing that warranted a ‘wow’.

‘No trace of the old family home, then?’ asked Bradford.

‘No,’ said my father with relish. ‘Not a brick. Not a chimney pot. There was no nonsense about listed buildings in those days. They got a wrecking ball in and flattened the lot.’

For a while longer we studied the housing estate. I had always imagined that the original Fryerne Court might at least have survived in the curve of an ivy-covered archway, or perhaps the remains of a kitchen garden or hothouse; a weed-shrouded knot garden. I had no excuse for such fantasies; my father had always assured me that nothing remained of the old house. It seemed as if Bradford had cherished a similar dream, for he stared at the row of houses as if at any moment he expected a veil to be pulled aside and the ghost of Fryerne Court to emerge like Camelot from the shining mist.

Once the memorial service was over the plan was for us all to make our way to the Fryerne Arms a mile or so away. We had passed this pub, draped in banners advertising ‘All You Can Eat Carvery!’, on our way to the church. It had been selected for the sentimental associations of its name rather than for any practical consideration. The fake-Tudor, half-timbered exterior and the fibreglass reproduction of our family crest attached to a pole in front of the pub were not inviting. The noise of car doors slamming stirred my father from his thoughts: reminiscences of Uncle Roland for his after-lunch speech; worries about his new job, or his new house.

‘Lunch,’ he said with a shudder. We moved off to join my mother.

My Uncle Roland’s work as an historian had produced various short essays, published in architectural journals, of interest mainly to specialists in the design of church roofs. Later in life he took it upon himself to write A History of the Fryernes of Fryerne Court, which began with the events of Bosworth Field in 1485. The Charles Fryerne of the day had distinguished himself during the course of the battle – it was not clear how – and had earned the gratitude of Henry Tudor. In an untypical and unhistorical way, Roland had allowed himself to speculate as to what those services might have been. Rescuing the colours? Diverting an axeman from attacking the future king? No firm conclusion was reached, but it was a fact that the services had led to a grant of land on the edge of the South Downs. A few decades later the accumulated rents were sufficient to finance the building of a house, which became known as Fryerne Court. At first it was a simple, graceful structure with leaded roofs and mullioned windows and high chimney stacks. As the original Tudor building was added to by successive generations of Fryernes, it lost its purity of conception and form, and its domestic scale, and became a large and uncomfortable-looking house with a surfeit of tack rooms, stable yards and grooms’ cottages. It also became too expensive to run on the income from farm rents, which had supported it quite comfortably for the first two hundred years of its existence.

Twenty-five years before he embarked on the project, someone had tipped off Uncle Roland that an oil painting of the original Tudor house was coming up for auction at Christie’s. He bought it. A colour plate of this picture was reproduced on the dust jacket of his book. He also possessed a black and white photograph taken in 1920 of the much-enlarged building that was pulled down soon afterwards. This was reproduced as the frontispiece. My father believed that it was the oil painting that had originally inspired Roland to undertake his final, and greatest, project. The resulting self-published tome was the crowning achievement of my uncle’s life.

The history of my ancestors, as related by Uncle Roland, was one of many small deeds and no great ones. The narrative sections of the work were brief, but undoubtedly dull out of all proportion to their length. The book was garnished with numerous genealogical tables, with headings such as ‘The Fryernes of New South Wales’. Bibliographies, indices and extensive footnotes filled the rest of its pages.

Indeed the Fryernes had achieved a kind of obscurity so comprehensive as to be rather unusual in its way: not a single politician nor bishop nor general nor nabob graced our ranks. For the most part we lived out our lives quietly, most of us within our means, troubling nobody. The last Fryerne to live in the house itself was another Roland, my uncle’s grandfather. This Roland was less dull and more ambitious than his forebears and it struck him that the family had played too modest a role in the country’s affairs. He wanted a seat in Parliament and a larger house. The seat eluded him, but he went ahead with his designs to build a residence suitable for a county magnate and a man of standing. In order to finance the ambitious extensions to the original building he decided to invest in South American railway stocks, which promised spectacular results. The results were indeed spectacular, but not in the way investors had hoped. That earlier Roland clung on as long as he could in the financial wreckage that followed the South American Railway Crash, which also brought down the great banking house of Overend & Gurney and a host of other speculators, but a few years later, Fryerne Court had to be sold. My ancestor went off to die in a boarding house in Hove, ending his life racked with guilt for losing the house on his watch.

Fryerne Court was not long enjoyed by the new owners. It did duty during the First World War as a temporary nursing home and by the time it was handed back by the Army the house was in a bit of a state. There was talk about trying to convert it for use as a school, but in the end the least risky solution was simply to pull it down. After all, the new owners had hardly lived there. They had performed no heroics at Bosworth Field. The site had development potential, but it was not until the 1950s that some developers obtained planning permission for residential housing. Then the ruins, parks, and stands of trees, so carefully landscaped over the last four hundred years, were felled, flattened, ploughed up and built over to bring into existence the desirable executive housing that was the Fryerne Court Residential Estate.

I thought about this as I sat at a narrow and overcrowded trestle table in the dining room of the Fryerne Arms, squeezed in between my mother on my left and a very large lady who said she was my cousin on my right. It was difficult to move my elbows. My father had foregone the option of the carvery and had chosen the menu for all of us. The starter was a prawn cocktail, which required only a spoon and wasn’t that tricky to eat. The second course was accompanied by bowls of steamed vegetables and mounds of mashed potato, placed at random around the table. On our plates were rubbery-looking chicken breasts. I managed to get the point of my knife into mine, and a thin stream of hot, garlicky butter shot across the table and splashed on to the plate of a girl sitting opposite me. I had noticed her in church: one of the few people close to my own age, although she was probably four or five years older than me.

‘Hey!’

‘Sorry. I didn’t expect it to do that,’ I said.

‘That’s the trouble with chicken Kiev. Don’t worry, it didn’t quite make my dress.’ She dabbed some of the butter from the table with her napkin.

‘Is that what this is? Chicken Kiev?’

‘That’s what it says on the menu. Now, which one are you?’

‘I’m Charles Fryerne. Uncle Roland was my father’s older brother.’ I gestured to where my father sat by waving rather inelegantly with my fork.

‘So now your father is the Fryerne of Fryerne Court?’

I had been listening to her voice. It was rather deep and melodious and had a familiar twang.

‘He is now, I suppose. You’re from New York, aren’t you?’

‘That’s smart of you. Yes, I am.’

‘We lived in New York when I was little. A block away from Brad Fryerne on the Upper East Side.’

‘Oh, but Brad’s my uncle! I’m Caroline Woodchester.’

I looked along the table at Brad. I could see no likeness. He was tall, pear-shaped, with thinning brown hair and a big moon-like face that had once been square-jawed but whose outlines were now beginning to blur. Caroline was about my height and solidly built, with dark hair and a lively, attractive face: not by any means beautiful, but a face you looked at and didn’t forget. She watched me making comparisons and added:

‘His niece by marriage, of course.’

As Brad had worked his way through several wives, this connection was difficult to challenge, but I found myself wondering whether she wasn’t really his mistress. My expression must have been easy to read, because a look of annoyance crossed her face.

‘So what do you think of all this nonsense?’ she said, somewhat abruptly.

‘Nonsense?’

‘The gathering of the clans. Talking about a house that was pulled down sixty years ago. Inheriting a title that doesn’t entitle you to anything. Except maybe being teased?’

I didn’t like the idea that anyone should mock my father. Still less did I believe that anyone. . .