British writer Paul Torday’s second book was published in 2008 as The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce, subtitled A Novel in Four Vintages, but the recently brought-out American edition is called simply Bordeaux. That makes the book’s wine theme more obvious, while dropping the moral and psychological mysteriousness suggested by “Irresistible.”
And who is Wilberforce? The narrator of the book, he’s a shockingly dissolute wine snob, a former software programmer who made his fortune and then retired, purchasing the estate—and the vast wine cellar—of a declining, unmarried gentleman named Francis Black. When we first meet Wilberforce, he has entered a smart London bistro where he plans to nibble on whatever he happens to order—food isn’t terribly relevant to him—while achieving a sort of vino-transcendence as he savors a rare 1982 Petrus that will cost him 3,000 pounds. Finishing the bottle, he realizes he may not soon or ever have another, and orders a second, the last in the restaurant’s cellar.
Given that he regularly consumes something on the order of five bottles in the course of a day, the Petruses—which he downs while talking to himself and chasing phantom memories that seem absolutely real to him—knock him into a temporary coma.
Wilberforce, in other words, is a walking disaster. When he comes to, his doctor warns him that he is on the verge of permanent dementia and worse. Scarcely acknowledging the doctor, Wilberforce is more disturbed that he can’t really taste wine properly anymore. He never stops thinking about wine, or his wonderful collection of bottles out at the country house.
This opening section is beautifully done, both in laying out Wilberforce’s accurate if pompous musings on vintages and tasting (Torday credits Robert Parker in a brief note), but also in its depiction of Wilberforce’s hideous, self-destructive seediness, his haughtiness, his grim sense of irony (he is much more acute than he realizes, or pretends to be with us).
The book probably isn’t meant to be a lecture on the dangers of wine mania and alcoholism, but anyone who is tempted upon emptying one bottle to uncork another might find it useful. Ask yourself: “Am I Wilberforce?”
If your reading group or wine club says yes, you have a problem.
The rest of the book is never less than readable, but it also becomes more facile as it goes: Torday tells the story in reverse, 2006 to 2002, so that by the end we have moved back to the days when Wilberforce barely drank but, sensing that a life spent at the computer was lonely and empty, stumbled on the friendship of Mr. Black and, along with him, a socially elite group that includes the woman Wilberforce will come to love. This isn’t a new trick (Harold Pinter used it in Betrayal, for one thing), and it doesn’t really resolve the enigma at the center of the book: Wilberforce’s relationship with the older Francis, who at the very least is a surrogate father but, in a way that doesn’t seem intentional, sometimes gives off an elusive, furtive sense of homosexual connection. Who is this Francis, with his vast but disorganized wine cellar (which may not be as priceless as Wilberforce thinks it is)? Is he taking advantage of Wilbeforce’s awkwardness and naivete? Is he deluded about his wine collection, as well? Why is there something sinister and manipulative about him?
A good novelist (and Torday is) isn’t required to answer any of this—he hints very strongly at one possible answer—but the intriguing obscurity of the bond between Wilberforce and Francis is much more powerful, and more tantalizingly real, than the linear (if inverse) narrative of Wilberforce’s downfall. There’s a whole other novel hidden in the labyrinth of that wine cellar.
