The Book Tower

Catching the train to London recently, I suddenly realised I was without a book. This is one of the most sobering of realisations. So when I noticed that Paul Torday’s wine-themed The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce was this week’s special offer with The Times I decided to give it a go.

I know next to nothing about Paul Torday and his novels. I’m aware that he’s written a very successful book called Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. I’m also aware that he didn’t give writing a proper try until he was in his sixties, which intrigues me. It also gives me hope. But I try and stay away from popular fiction because at heart I am a snob, but the three hours on trains without reading material other than work-related documents filled me with dread, so I took the plunge.

Wilberforce is a novel told backwards, which in four sections reverses the life of its narrator. The beginning is very much Wilberforce’s end; stuck in a four bottles of wine a day habit he’s slowly sinking towards oblivion. The opening chapters are excellent; Wilberforce is a comic character, strolling into a restaurant and downing two bottles of vintage wine worth thousands of pounds before being carried out in a stupor. I laughed, but I also asked both how he had reached such a decadent state of alcoholism and how he had become so rich. Torday answers these questions slowly as he strips away the life in question, revealing how Wilberforce has reached this sorry state.

Torday does something rare in a novel, and something I’m always crying out for. This is the third factor. This is where, at about a third of the way through a novel, I am hanging on every word. I’m loving it. I’m cracking open a bottle of wine and celebrating Paul Torday. But unfortunately, even though I found this novel great to start with and exceptional between a third and two thirds, I was disappointed by the final section. Without giving too much away, I realised I’d fallen for the drunken, careless and infuriating Wilberforce, and as Torday slipped back each year I was less enamoured by his earlier incarnations. Wilberforce is a wonderful creation in the tradition of the unreliable narrator, and as he becomes more reliable he’s less addictive. No matter. Torday is a very good writer and is almost as good as Jonathan Coe, who might have made this something really special. But worth a read, even if you have to pay full price for it.