Plume

Plume
Will Wiles

The dark, doomy humour of Care of Wooden Floors mixed with the fantastical, anarchic sense of possibility of The Way Inn, brought together in a fast moving story set in contemporary London.Jack Bick is an interview journalist at a glossy lifestyle magazine. From his office window he can see a black column of smoke in the sky, the result of an industrial accident on the edge of the city. When Bick goes from being a high-functioning alcoholic to being a non-functioning alcoholic, his life goes into freefall, the smoke a harbinger of truth, an omen of personal apocalypse. An unpromising interview with Oliver Pierce, a reclusive cult novelist, unexpectedly yields a huge story, one that could save his job. But the novelist knows something about Bick, and the two men are drawn into a bizarre, violent partnership that is both an act of defiance against the changing city, and a surrender to its spreading darkness.With its rich emotional palette, Plume explores the relationship between truth and memory: personal truth, journalistic truth, novelistic truth. It is a surreal and mysterious exploration of the precariousness of life in modern London.

Copyright (#u12ebdc24-7568-5f1f-957f-b8f9476145db)

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019

Copyright © Will Wiles 2019

Cover design by Luke Bird

Cover illustration © Blue Jean Images / Alamy

Will Wiles asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Information on previously published material appears here (#litres_trial_promo).

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008194413

Ebook Edition © March 2019 ISBN: 9780008194420

Version: 2019-03-25

Dedication (#u12ebdc24-7568-5f1f-957f-b8f9476145db)

For my parents, with love.

Epigraph (#u12ebdc24-7568-5f1f-957f-b8f9476145db)

‘People begin to see that something more goes into the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed — a knife — a purse — and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.’

‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’

Thomas De Quincey

Contents

Cover (#u08e4147d-a5f5-5e28-a482-9befe979262c)

Title Page (#u9ac9b441-b925-58f6-8b95-55746e51bba4)

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Will Wiles

About the Publisher

ONE (#u12ebdc24-7568-5f1f-957f-b8f9476145db)

We want beginnings. We want strong, obvious beginnings. Start late, finish early, that’s the advice from people who write magazine features. Ditch the scene-setting, background-illustrating and throat-clearing and get stuck in. It’s not a novel.

Lately, however, I’ve been fixated on beginnings, and their impossibility. I trace back and back through my life, trying to find the day, the hour I started to fail. Whenever I alight upon a plausible incident, where it might make sense to begin, I find causes and reasons and conditions and patterns that can be traced back further. And then I discover that I have gone back too far, that I have reached a point well before the event horizon of my failure, where the mass of it in my future overcomes any possibility of escape in the present. No fatal slip, or fatal sip.