Darkness visible | 9 May 2019

With his first novel about looking after an engineered wood floor, and a second novel about what it is like to stay in a chain hotel, Will Wiles seems determined to corner the market in unpromising literary subjects. His latest novel, Plume, is about a chap who lives in a rented flat in London and who works in an office. Hooray! — the sainted few who are already Wiles fans will learn this with their hearts pumping with anticipatory happiness. Mine certainly did.

A quick summary is appropriate, as Wiles’s novels remain, for now, under-regarded. Care of Wooden Floors (2012) was exactly what it said on the tin. The narrator flies to a European city to house-sit an apartment of an absent friend called Oskar. Oskar is fastidiously house-proud, and demands only that the greatest care be taken of his specially installed wooden floor. In a mere eight days a classic comic inferno ensues.

The Way Inn (2014) was an exercise in surrealism, disguised as a satire on modern business conferences. The protagonist was in fact the hotel alluded to in the title, one of a multinational chain. Neither we nor Neil Double, a conference surrogate who stands in for unwilling delegates and reports back later, realise this at first. He loves everything about chain hotels, while we recognise the same bland budget features we’ve never really noticed before, and shudder enjoyably. Think Jacques Tati’s Playtime, with the imaginative energy of J.G. Ballard.

The plume of Plume is the column of stinking black smoke rising above an explosion at a fuel depot in Barking. The sky darkens. Jack Bick, a profile writer for a magazine, feels as if he is the only person in London to notice this catastrophic event.