Customer Reviews

Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Wilberforce enters a wine cellar looking to buy wine and meets the owner Francis Black and two friends sitting drinking. He is invited to join them in having a glass. Over the next few weeks he becomes very good friends with all of them and starts mixing in the social circles.

Francis Black owns 100,000 bottle of red wine and when he finds he is dying he offers Wilberforce all the wine for 1 pound on the condition he buys the building above the cellar "the undercroft" only for the amount of the mortgage owing. Francis has noone to leave it to and during their short friendship he has taught Wilberforce all about how to taste wine.

Wilberforce angonises over the purchase, as he would have to sell his successful business to be able to do it. But he then could do consulting from home.

The story is told backwards. From the stage where Wilberforce drinks 5 to 6 bottles of high quality wine a day, refuses to sell any of the wine off to pay some of his huge debts. His obsession to keep the wine and tasting (note the word tasting not drinking) becomes more important than his marriage and everything else. I listened to this on audio. Every now and then you can hear the gurgle of the wine being poured into a glass. The telling of it in sections working backwards in time was an interesting way of story telling and I felt it didn't detract the story at all.

I really enjoyed the story, it was a little sad at times but overall I highly recommend it. A story with a totally different angle. I will be reading more of his works.

Subtitled A Novel in Four Vintages, I was greatly relieved that after the first vintage, 2006, the next part was 2004 for I could foresee little joy in reading about Wilberforce beyond 2006. I remember being similarly relieved reading Sarah Waters' "The Night Watch". The telling of the story going progressively back in time worked for me although Wilberforce never really became a character of whom there was much to admire. Torday writes well and weaves a credible story about a person's obsession with wine. I am not sure that this book would ever be recommended in an AA meeting, unless shock therapy was intended! I prefered "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen" as "Wilberforce" was a bleak, lonely and depressing character. Nevertheless, the writing made an otherwise unappealing journey into a book which lasted long after consumption as a classic Bordeaux claret should. There was depth and subtlety in what was written and also the painstakingly slow unfolding of Wilberforce's background with the delightful innuendo of Wilberforce's first name and its implications. There might be some readers who, like me, think of giving up after the first vintage but that would be a shame as this is a worthy read.

Have you seen the film Memento? The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce: A Novel in Four Vintages doesn't revolve around someone afflicted with short-term memory loss, but it does employ a reverse storytelling technique and isn't jolly. Life sucked for Leonard in the movie; and despite his cheeriness about feeling life will turn out well, Wilberforce, the novel's off-kilter narrator, displays the depths of his own "loserness" upfront in act or "vintage" number one.

Paul Torday's second novel -- his first was, of course, the charmingly quirky Salmon Fishing in the Yemen -- kicks off in 2006 and works back, in four "vintages," to 2002. Basically, Wilberforce (in normal chronology) degenerates from a socially challenged workaholic software company owner who avoids alcohol to a man drinking himself to death on multiple bottles of select but questionable vintage a day. He accomplishes this in those few years by finding his way to Francis Black's not exactly prospering wine shop, Caerlyon Hall, one evening after work. Gradually he becomes a regular there and even acquires a few other friends, including a woman, Catherine, he gradually desires to marry, and a man who stands in his way. Under Francis' tutelage, Wilberforce becomes a wine connoisseur of sorts, and then Francis, an older man in poor health, prevails upon Wilberforce to take on responsibility for his considerable, debt-ridden wine cellar when the time comes. Why would Wilberforce take on such a life-altering commitment? Therein lies the crux of the matter....

Torday scored winningly with his satire, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Alfred, luckless sod he was in many ways, grew in awareness and love during his incredible adventure. Wilberforce, however, is no Alfred. He -- and I give nothing away that isn't made plain in the first section of the book -- is a doomed man. The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce: A Novel in Four Vintages deals with themes of inevitability: Is our genetic inheritance insurmountable? Are we but the puppets of fate? Both Alfred and Wilberforce are diffident, socially handicapped men, but Torday doesn't stuff Alfred into a funnel that leads only to the refuse pile; Wilberforce he does.

Reading The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce: A Novel in Four Vintages could appear a thankless endeavor at times: why bother with a story being told so that each revelation unfolds before its underpinnings? But, as in the acclaimed Memento, Torday's exercise in backward story structure pays off. His character study feeds the curiosity about how and why Wilberforce reaches each stage of his undoing. Torday, in effect, puts the rind peels back on the orange, until on the last page Wilberforce is a man who can say in optimistic sincerity that he thinks life will turn out well for him.

Still, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was the more enjoyable book of the two. Torday's third novel, The Girl on the Landing, is expected in early 2009. I await it with cautious eagerness, hoping for continued ingeniousness and less morbidity than displayed in The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce: A Novel in Four Vintages.