Tom Williams
Life in the Big Smoke
Will Wiles’s Plume begins with an explosion in east London that is felt by its protagonist, Jack Bick, as he sits in a Monday meeting and waits for the ripple to hit his phone. Bick is a journalist who writes profiles and an alcoholic, and the novel tracks a few days in his life as he seeks to push out a feature in order to justify his job at a failing lifestyle magazine, where he has developed a reputation for ‘latenesses, absences, missed deadlines, empty pages’.
Bick’s mission is to track down and interview Oliver Pierce, a reclusive writer who produced a highly charged nonfiction book, Night Traffic, about the experience of being mugged and its aftermath. Most notably, Pierce came to ‘a transgressive acceptance of what had happened’, ultimately deciding that in the modern city
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'Heaven for him was being caressed by duchesses in gilded salons and entertaining royalty in his palatial mansion ... where he showed off his gemmed gewgaws and laced the cocktails with Benzedrine.'
Piers Brendon on the diaries of Chips Channon (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/he-played-sardines-with-the-aga-khan
'Like so many of Ishiguro’s human narrators ... Klara contains within herself divisions and contradictions, pockets of knowledge that she isn’t able to synthesise fully.'
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Surveillance, facial recognition and control: my review of @jonfasman's "We See It All" https://literaryreview.co.uk/watching-the-watchers via @Lit_Review