Women and song can wait
If
you were living under a rock last year, you might have missed
the phenomenal success of Paul Torday’s debut novel Salmon
Fishing in the Yemen. It won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse
Prize for comic writing; it was serialised on radio; oh, and the
small matter of featuring on many lists of summer reads didn’t
hurt. Torday, who was 60 when the book was published, hasn’t
sat back and polished his gong, but instead next month gives us
his second novel, The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce.
The whimsical title and jaunty cover promise more light comic
satire: and any reader expecting that might be disappointed. Me?
I was pleasantly surprised.
Wilberforce is a 37-year-old former software engineer,
who has sold his business to pursue a life of, well, drinking.
Or as he sees it, to safeguard the inheritance of his great friend
Francis Black, whose house and underground wine cellar (”the
undercroft”) he bought for a million pounds. Not bad for
a hundred thousand bottles of priceless wine.
‘As he sees it’ is the key here. We
join the story in 2006 when Wilberforce is in full denial:
With, I admit, trembling hands I found the
last bottle of Château Carbonnieux and opened it. An alcoholic,
which I am not and never have been, would not have sat and let
it breathe for half an hour, and let it come up towards room
temperature. He would not have poured it lovingly into the large
bowl of a tasting glass, to ensure the bouquet could develop
properly. Nor would he have checked the glass first for any
mustiness.
No, Wilberforce is certainly not an alcoholic, it’s
just that “I have made up for the woeful ignorance of the
first thirty years of my life by the passion and intensity of
my relationship with wine ever since.” The scene is set
for the eternal struggle: the bottle v everything else, everything
else v the bottle. It’s such a tough one to call, isn’t
it?
Torday has cleverly used the same structure as Sarah
Waters’ The Night Watch, so the narrative presents
periods of Wilberforce’s life in reverse order: first 2006,
then 2004, 2003 and 2002. We know the ending from one quarter
of the way through the book, but the beauty is in what happens
next - or before. Things we thought we knew are subtly undermined,
characters’ relationships are brought into focus (and smashed
apart), and layer upon layer of cruel dramatic irony is applied.
Only one coincidence hinted strongly at toward the end was a step
too far for me.
The success of The Irresistible Inheritance
of Wilberforce - and why it is a bold move as Torday’s
follow-up to Salmon Fishing - is to make such a readable
story out of pretty bleak ingredients, and from a hero who is,
if not an out-and-out thoroughgoing bastard, certainly selfish
for much of the time. (Of course all these are excellent factors
for any book to exhibit, in my view.) There is some sympathy to
be had though, as we see the reason for Wilberforce’s drive
and position, as a boy and now a man who belongs nowhere, when
“everyone else in the world was in on the secret and had
a key to its iron door.”
Torday may not be a great stylist, and some of the
research both on wine and the medical consequences of wine could
have been a little more lightly worn, but I suspect few will care
about such niceties when the pages practically turn themselves
and the closing lines of the book, after such a heady brew, are
so deliciously sobering.
John Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
