Customer Reviews
Highly readable entertainment - By: unlikely_heroine, 02 Oct 2008 
In 2006, Wilberforce is an alcoholic close to killing himself through his prolific wine consumption of four or five bottles a day. Regularly barred from the high-end restaurants he visits in search of the most exclusive & expensive vintages, Wilberforce does not appreciate that he is addicted; he views himself as a wine connoisseur, even when he wakes up in hospital from an alcohol-induced coma. From this engaging beginning, Paul Torday takes the reader back to three previous years of Wilberforce's life, in which we see the journey that transformed him from a young, successful businessman to a walking disaster area.
There are some darkly humorous moments in the novel, but for the most part, this is downbeat stuff. Whilst it is highly readable, a few things in the book don't quite convince; for example, the voice of Wilberforce as a man in his mid- to late thirties - even alllowing for his decline & world-weariness, it's difficult to believe in the age Torday has given him. The fact that Wilberforce has a mystery family background & parentage, & that his first name is kept secret for much of the book, are curious asides that do little to add any sense of suspense or intrigue to what is essentiallly a tale of a messed-up life.
There are other problems. We don't get to know the Catherine character at alll (although perhaps this is deliberate; she does not seem to have left an impression on Wilberforce as a truly real person, either). In addition, the book's opening chapters, in which Wilberforce gets inebriated on £3,000-a-bottle Pétrus before being forcibly ejected from his latest choice of eatery, & tries to find a way to obtain wine despite the attentions of a nurse hired in an effort to prevent him doing any more damage to himself, are significantly more entertaining than the couple of hundred pages that follow.
However, I thoroughly enjoyed this. The hints we are given of Wilberforce's mistakes & misapprehensions (and not just regarding his alcoholism) mean that there is a somewhat twisted pleasure to be had out of knowing more than the protagonist does. It is true that there is little plot to speak of, & that in telling the story backwards, Torday loses the book's early riotous momentum, as we spend time with a Wilberforce who is ever more sensible & considered in his behaviour. This was nonetheless, a fun read for me & on that basis it gets four stars, though I could probably pick some more holes in it if I wanted to.
It is Torday's characterisation of Ed Simmonds, a.k.a. Ed Hartlepool (Hartlepool being the title he will inherit) that is Torday's most believable creation in this novel. We don't see much of him, but Ed feels real; he lives & breathes a casuallly easy existence, something that eludes Wilberforce to the end - or rather, has eluded him from the beginning.
More resistable than they'd have you believable. - By: Mr. S. Moulster, 29 Sep 2008 
I haven't gone out of my way to write a negative review before but, I'm sorry, this book fallls well short of the mark.
It is at least double the length it should be: stop at page 151 & you might gain some satisfaction. The rest is a long, slow, painful death.
I had to see it through to the end to learn why Torday had written it backwards. It had started promisingly with a sense of strong characters & the need to know what happens. Unfortunately, he tells the story by about page 100 & there's little more of interest.
The repetitions of the story from Wilberforce's earlier viewpoint are baffling at first, then I realized he was telling his story from varying moments of increasing clarity. This might have been an effective technique, except - before discovering wine - he was a dull & sociallly inadequate man. His dullness becomes spattered across the whole thing: two-dimensional characters, stilted & ineffective dialogue, no story, no action. No climax.
Torday clearly wants us to like Francis - but there's nothing there. The suggestion of a father-son link is about as sophisticated as a Neighbours' story-line. Catherine had promise; but she can thank her lucky stars she wasn't alllowed to degenerate along with the rest through the last two hundred pages. Ed & Eck? Pointless.
The writing is inconsistent too. There are two adjacent pages, for example, where he has an absolute 'up' frenzy. Every other word is 'up'. Did anybody bother reading this before going to print?
Torday's first book might have been good, but I won't be trying it. He clearly didn't have many ideas left when it came to the second one. All he's managed to do is convince somebody his novella is a novel. If he is to continue to write books with no action & uncomplicated plots, he should learn to create fuller characters & write realistic, convincing dialogue.
This is beach reading at best; but why spoil your holiday? If you want a character who loves Claret, try Horace Rumpole. At least Mortimer knows when to end a story.
Excellent, dark...not funny - By: William, 24 Jun 2008 Now here's a good example of why it's not a good idea to judge a book by its cover. Its design echoes that of Torday's wonderfully funny & original debut Salmon Fishing In The Yemen; so much so that, had you not read the reviews, you could be forgiven for buying The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce assuming that you had your hands on another hilarious & rather touching novel. Well, this isn't very touching & it's certainly not funny.
In fact, it's a relatively dark read about the nature & destructive impact of loneliness. It's also, in rather a big way, about an almost sexual obsession with wine. The two themes are knitted together around a plot which is deftly turned inside out & re-ordered.
Torday is quite some writer: stylish & terribly readable. He has produced two such startlingly different novels that you wonder what's coming next.
Writing is as fluid as the plonk - By: Penny Nom, 12 Apr 2008 
I cannot drink as alcohol gives me migraine but now I know why people like wine. This book takes us through Wilberforces journey in his new found life after years of being a computor expert he becomes a wine expert. But there is a dark side to this book that is so very clever I got swept into a dangerous vortex of alcohol with Wilberfoce.
Pass the Bottle - By: Oh behave!, 05 Apr 2008 Great, tragic page-turner of a novel that's almost impossible to read without a glass of red in your hand. Only once subjected to Torday's exquisite descriptions of the delicious tasting Bordeaux which Wilberforce is so fond of, you'll be spitting out anything that's not top notch.
