Fiction review: 'Bordeaux' by Paul Torday

Bordeaux
By Paul Torday
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 308 pages; $24
"Don't confuse tasting with drinking, darling," says Wilberforce, the main character in Paul Torday's new novel, "Bordeaux." He's responding to his wife's pointed concern about his intemperate wine drinking.

The fragility of that line between measured, sober assessment and Dionysian excess is familiar to most oenophiles, many of whom have probably reflected at some point (as I have) on whether the effort they put into wine connoisseurship is nothing more than a labor-intensive, high-minded justification for consuming alcohol. So it is in the sad story of Wilberforce, who literally drinks himself to death's door - and, we presume, through it - with fine old Bordeaux in the first section of the book.

Torday's book has an unusual structure. It begins in the story's present, 2006, then works back in time through three previous years to reveal how Wilberforce's life came to be in such a shabby state. And shabby it is: He is losing focus in his vision, passing out in public places and falling into alcoholism-related delusions that have him being chased through the rainy streets of Bogota, Colombia. And he is haunted by an acronym, TTNMWWTTW, whose meaning he can't recall.

Over the course of the journey we learn that Wilberforce - the only name he uses - was a lonely, teetotaling, programming whiz living in the north of England who had an almost Asperger's-like ignorance of human emotions and has known nothing but solitary computer work his entire life.

A chance turn off a scenic road led him to Francis Black, a dying estate owner and wine retailer with an enormous subterranean cellar filled with Bordeaux and other wines. Black gives Wilberforce one of his first tastes of wine and some free bottles, with the confident tone of a drug pusher: "Take it, drink it; it is a gift for me ... Once you learn to love my wine, you will pay the full market price." Pay, Wilberforce does.

Through Black and his wine shop, Wilberforce falls in with a coterie of local landed aristocracy, as jocose and sophisticated as you would expect from any classic English novel by Trollope or Forster. They adopt him mainly out of curiosity; Wilberforce is wealthy but otherwise a completely unknown species to them.

As he finds himself with friends for the first time in his life, Wilberforce becomes entangled in a romantic betrayal, a fatal car crash and sells his company in order to salvage Black's estate and wine collection. This all proves too much for him and he unravels to the tune of a four-to-five-bottle-a-day wine habit.

It's a dreary story that begins with an exciting thrust of mystery and narrative propulsion: Why is this guy in such bad shape? Are the noir scenes in Bogota a real experience? Will he save himself? Despite Torday's clear and sometimes poignant writing, the book's structure is its undoing.

All is cleared up early on, thus our interest in finishing the book depends not on answers but our fascination in the questions. And, sadly, I had increasingly little interest in these questions. As a protagonist, Wilberforce is so devoid of wit, background or will that it is difficult to care what happens to him. Plodding back through the melodrama of his demise becomes a chore, rather than a race to any emotional or intellectual reward.

Despite its plainly evocative title (in Britain, the book came out with the almost comic-sounding title "The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce"), wine proves to be more a prop than a useful character or context for the plot. Black is presented as a wine savant with masterful knowledge of the terroir and personalities of Bordeaux, and Wilberforce is made out to be a precocious student.

Yet Torday never convincingly establishes his characters' real emotional and intellectual connection to wine. He states it but doesn't demonstrate it. Perhaps this is why so much of the wine-related plot of the book does not ring true.

Every oenophile I know has an almost equivalent love of cuisine: The opening of fine bottles is scheduled around great meals to show them off. Yet Wilberforce and Black have seemingly no interest in food.

It's hard to imagine consuming the acid and tannin in five bottles of Bordeaux a day without more than a passing nod to food with which to wash it down. And we are asked to believe that Wilberforce truly loves Bordeaux and has amassed an expert's knowledge, yet he makes no commentary about the land, soil, culture and milieu of his favorite wine region. Wine drinking is a form of travel, and he lacks the wine lover's thirst for experience.

Of course, one might counter that Wilberforce is too emotionally stunted to express these things and too desperately alcoholic to truly pay attention. He has destroyed any line between tasting and drinking. But if the empty vessel that is Wilberforce doesn't really care about the wine or about himself, why should we?