Review: “The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce” – Getting High Over a Hobby.

This is Paul Torday’s second novel. But with a degree of certainty, I can say he is comfortable writing about the maladroit outsider. Over the last few years, the outsiders have been methodically glamorized by indie pictures from America. The employed narrative relies on black humour with a soundtrack filled with world music and along the way personality quirks are shoveled down the audience throat. However, the outsiders in Paul Torday’s world are more accessible men, whom you are sure to encounter in your workplace. They are also middle class men, who have achieved a degree of success in their chosen field.

The Irreversible Inheritance of Wilberforce could be disappointing, if you go in expecting another satirical angle on a nation and human condition. There is not much of a story. In fact, you know the ending at the end of the “first vintage”. Only half way though the first vintage, I realized Paul Torday has discarded all the ingredients, which made his first novel (Salmon Fishing in Yemen) eminently readable. This material is much somber.

The narrator, Mr. Wilberforce is a successful software developer, who is now reduced to being an alcoholic on expensive wines. He has been a loner his entire life and decides to create a social life for himself. He falls in love with a much engaged Catherine. He is seduced to Francis Black’s wine collection in his undercroft, though he has not tasted even lager. He is fundamentally naïve, speculates the other modes in life, underestimates the value of his software business built over 15 years and overestimates the value of friends he makes late in his life. His every decision is impetuous, including the selling of his software business to buy the wine cellar from Francis Black and his short lived marriage to an engaged women. His life becomes much like the “hobby” he is drawn towards.

‘That is the most wonderful and the most frustrating thing about wine: it is a work of art, sometimes a work of genius, that has taken a lifetime of experience to create and has matured for ten or fifteen years in the bottle in order to be ready for you to drink. Then, as soon as the wine is opened, it begins to die. In twenty-four hours it is dead.’

Paul Torday has once again drawn a portrait of a modern working man, who despite satisfying work and protected innocence seeks happiness elsewhere. In ‘Salmon Fishing in Yemen’, Dr. Alfred Jones quiet research life is taken for a ride through a scientifically unsound project from Prime Minster’s office. Paul Torday also has a dim view on modern relationship. The marriage between is Dr. Alfred Jones and his wife is loveless and is a financial arrangement between an academic and a corporate executive. Here, Mr. Wilberforce is unable to cultivate any sort of friendship in his office and relates his emptiness to the lack of a hobby.

In his first novel, the lackluster is provided buoyancy by the underlying satire. But in his second novel, the straight narrative is plodding and ceases to be a page turner. Besides that, Torday’s description of a software (‘language of numbers”) profession is a bit shallow. To his credit, Torday manages to withhold just enough information (including “his visit to Bogota”), but they seem completely absurd in the end.