Magazine writer and secret alcoholic Jack Bick is about to have an interesting week. He must interview two famous subjects and produce two draft features before week’s end - or maybe he’s fired? And then an actual fire erupts in London, giving off a plume of smoke. Except Jack sees smoke even when it’s not there. And cockatoos. There are plumes everyplace - plumes of smoke and the yellow plumes of cockatoos! Prize-winning novelists, real estate moguls and tech gurus - it’s all kicking off in Jack’s world just as his unbridled drinking spirals further out of control along with the hallucinations and his ability to function!
I’m a big fan of alcoholics in literature - Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson’s stories, Patrick DeWitt’s Absolution, Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, Stephen King’s The Shining (and the brief autobiographical pieces about his substance abuse in On Writing), and the nonfiction memoirs of Augusten Burroughs’ Dry and Jack London’s John Barleycorn - so I was predisposed to like Will Wiles’ novel Plume. And I did - it’s an absolutely cracking novel!
Though I’m not an addict myself, I feel like I’ve got a good idea of an alcoholic’s experience from the many books I’ve read featuring them and Wiles portrayed the sordid day-to-day misery of it here convincingly and entertainingly. I was intrigued by the ominous and strange hallucinations Jack was seeing and what they meant, and wanted to find out the demons behind his drinking - what trauma drove him to this behaviour? - all of which Wiles teases out skilfully, hinting at this and that (I won’t mention any spoilers here).
There wasn’t much I wasn’t that taken with. I thought Jack and his writer subject Oliver Pierce’s jolly around town as material for the article Jack was trying to write was tedious and overlong. The ending was also underwhelming - in fact, everything involving the tech guru Quin and his social media app Tamesis felt superfluous. What’s that rule about editing - if you can cut it out and it doesn’t affect the story then it should be cut out? That’s basically this entire aspect of the book.
The novel would’ve been perfectly fine if it was just about an alcoholic writer trying to get usable material out of his two subjects while his life fell apart. The links between Pierce and Quin were tenuous at best and I wasn’t sure what Wiles was getting at with his ending - a dystopian-esque finale seemed silly and pointless. I guess Quin was sorta important in contributing to Pierce’s actions but, eh, it still seemed overly contrived and unnecessary.
Otherwise, it’s a compelling narrative. Jack’s time with Pierce unearths revelations about Pierce’s award-winning bestseller, Night Traffic, sending them on a shaky journey to the truth. Pierce is an amusing character who starts off seemingly normal and then gets rapidly more unstable by the chapter. Even the smug real estate mogul Alexander de Chauncey came across memorably - charming, if a little conceited, but vulnerable and human. The only character who seemed cartoonish was Quin, particularly at the end.
All of the office scenes were terrific and surprisingly exciting. Wiles throughout occasionally touches the zeitgeist with younger people feeling unmoored as getting on the property ladder, particularly in London, gets harder and harder and, beyond symbolising Jack’s deteriorating mental state, the spectre of Grenfell, though never explicitly mentioned, looms each time burning buildings and fires are mentioned. There’s at least one unexpected twist and a funny book-length joke set up right at the beginning and paid off near the end concerning Jack’s landlord. And Jack himself is a sympathetic and likeable trainwreck of a protagonist to spend the duration of the book with.
There’s a lot to enjoy in Plume and I certainly did. Will Wiles is a very talented writer and masterful storyteller. If you like alcoholic lit (“lit-lit”?) as I do, you’ll especially dig this novel but, even if you don’t, this is an enthralling story of desperate times as seen through the eyes of a desperate man - as grim as that may sound, great writing like this is always uplifting.
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