Plume by Will Wiles review – where satire meets surrealism
As Will Wiles demonstrated in his first novel, 2012's Care of Wooden Floors, a stain is never just a stain. That novel was a Kafkaesque farce, set in an unnamed post-Soviet principality in which an accidental wine-spill provoked a full-blown existential crisis. The narrator of Wiles's third novel appears no less neurotic and persecuted; though in this case it is a mysterious column of smoke that seems to be following him around.
Jack Bick, a feature writer for an east London-based lifestyle magazine, finds himself staring idly out of the window during an editorial meeting when he notices a mysterious new landmark has appeared: "A column of black smoke arose from the ill-defined, low-rise muddle of the horizon city. Further out than the skyscrapers on the Isle of Dogs, it nevertheless bested them in height and weight, appearing as the most solid structure in sight."
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