Fiction: The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce By Paul Torday Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 308pp. £12.99Just last year, Paul Torday roused an unsuspecting book world with his improbably-titled debut novel, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.
His light touch while wrestling with some dark materials soon had the most curmudgeonly of critics cracking uncharacteristic smiles and warming - not a verb usually applied to reviewers - to this literary latecomer. The book's fate was subsequently sealed with a stamp from daytime television stalwarts Richard and Judy, and went on to become one of the summer's biggest sellers.
Less than a year later, the prolific Torday is back, having knocked off the "difficult second novel", The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce. It's the story of the eponymous hero, who begins the book somewhat unsteadily as he drunkenly negotiates his way into an expensive London restaurant, lured by the promise of a bottle of 1982 Château Pétrus, which is to set him back a trifling £3,000. Wilberforce's love of wine - a passion he expounds on in tellingly dispassionate prose, intellectualising his emotional investment in the drink that so clearly dominates his life - is immediately to the fore. He narrates with a kind of deliberate eloquence, evoking an avuncular member of the peerage, red-nosed, weak-willed and vaguely troubled by his blanks in memory and propensity to hallucinations.
But Wilberforce, it emerges, is only 37, and his drinking, along with his upper-class disdain for money and his florid prose, are newly acquired. He is new to this world that so consumes him, but despite contesting that he cannot be considered an addict given that he lets each wine sit and breathe before quaffing his quota of four bottles a day, it is clear from the outset that we are encountering a man in the last stages of alcoholism.
What is different about The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce is that its protagonist's rapid decline is told backwards: we are first introduced to the deluded dipso, and travel back in stages to the moment where a gifted young software engineer from a cold home first stumbles into the wine-soaked world of Francis Black, a world of privilege, belonging and love. Through this reversed chronology, the layers of alcoholic fantasy are carefully stripped away, and Black's wine cellar, known as "the undercroft", which is described by the alcoholic Wilberforce as a vast and seductive home to hundreds of thousands of the world's greatest wines, is revealed in the end as a rather ordinary wine cellar which entirely underwhelmed him on first encounter.
Unspooling time in such a fashion is a risky literary device: with the consequences of the events that subsequently unfold already revealed in the opening pages, even more investment is required on the part of the reader to follow the protagonist back into his past. Torday ambitiously ups the ante by presenting us with an unlikeable, selfish and socially awkward hero whose actions have permanent and disastrous consequences for those who try to love him.
It's a device Alexander Masters skillfully employed in his acclaimed biography Stuart: A Life Backwards, but in Wilberforce's case, we are not afforded the kind of emotional cushioning provided by Masters's personal narration. Torday gives us Wilberforce through Wilberforce's eyes only, and it is only in the final pages that we get to see him at his most appealing: young, naive, and full of a promise made all the more heartbreaking by our knowledge of his insalubrious end.
Apart from the rather awkward hints at Wilberforce's true parentage - a trick that somehow cheapens the richness of the whole - Torday's book, while it may alienate some of his Salmon Fishing readers due to the unromantic nature of its tragedy, marks him out as a writer of serious promise, whose achievements in this second novel hint at bigger, better works to come. If this sexagenarian continues cranking out a book a year, there are some excellent vintages to look forward to.
Fiona McCann is a freelance journalist