Well, Will Wiles has certainly slapped down his calling card
with great style and humour with this, his debut novel.
The premise of the book is very simple and almost like a
sit-com in its staging; in fact one could very easily see this book transferred
to the stage in three succinct acts.
The central character-who remains nameless throughout the
book- is asked by Oskar, a successful, minimalist classical composer and an old
university friend, to house sit his apartment in a nameless Eastern European
city for a couple of weeks whilst he sorts out a messy divorce from his
Californian wife in LA. The would-be house
sitter and narrator is a struggling copywriter producing Health and Safety
literature for local councils, but of course has the usual yearnings to be a
‘proper’ writer, and so he jumps at the chance for some time and space to
really write and, in a foreign city no less, what could be more perfect.
As such the book consists almost entirely of an interior
monologue of this central character, punctuated only occasionally by encounters
with a couple of real people, most notably Oskar’s formidable cleaner. It is the maintaining of this interior
monologue so convincingly for so long- and with such a dry, affecting humour-
that is a real testament to the skill of Wiles as an author.
The apartment the central character finds himself in is as
he had expected from his knowledge of Oskar as a friend; minimalist in its
modernism and immaculately clean, organised and tidy, the only anomaly to its
engineered perfection to our narrator’s mind, being the presence of two typically
independent minded cats. Oskar has
however left detailed instructions for him even to the point of leaving notes
hidden all over the place, which even at times appear to uncannily pre-empt any
problems the narrator may encounter.
There are in particular instructions given to the care of
his precious, expensive and unvarnished wood flooring.
And of course problems the narrator most
certainly does encounter in an increasingly hapless- and darkly hilarious- way
as the week progresses…
It would be easy to describe the unfolding of events in the
flat under the narrator’s watch over this fateful week as pure farce- but the
overall unfurling of the story is deeper, darker and more affecting in its
human complexities than that of ‘mere’ farce, although a primary driving force
of the book – and the one that refers firmly back to its sit-com premise time
and again- is one that clearly, unashamedly references that form. Wiles however pulls off a more interesting,
intellectual take on the narrator’s week that gives the reader more substance to
chew on rather than just groans and laughs and, cleverly, weaves in the
complicated psychosis of not just the narrator, but also of a character- Oskar
of course- that never actually appears in the book in person, in ‘real-time’ -apart
from during a telephone call at the end- that provides an elegant denouement to
the whole tale.
Actually the book is in fact a neat situationist take on the
characters of the narrator and Oskar. To
my mind this makes the location- an eastern European city once subject to the
rigours of authoritarianism, and now succumbing to the asymmetrical forces of
free-market capitalism- a perfect foil for the inner tensions and shifting mind-sets
of the two central characters. In fact
the author at certain parts of the narrative subtly draws attention to these
political, economic and societal movements at work in the city’s past and
present when he ventures out into the city centre-most notably when he visits a
local museum, a concert then a lap-dancing club- that such a place has to be a
very deliberate location on his part in which to centre his situationist
explorations.
However despite the surprising and pleasing intellectual
basis of this book, Wile’s never loses the ability of exploring human frailty,
self-delusion and insecurity with the lightest of touches which, at times, are genuinely
hilarious. You can sense from the outset
that the narrator is doomed to a week that is going to fall apart and that it
will happen largely through events not of his making- but I personally ended up
cheering him along despite his own delusions and frantic excuse-makings [all of
them incidentally to himself] until he does actually emerge from the story as
some unusual- and very typical and unwilling- English hero.
It has to be said there are to my mind a couple of rather
weak passages that could have been edited out- the narrators musings on
pornography and the displays at a lap-dancing clubs are unnecessary and trite
in an awkwardly ‘teenage’ way. They
nonetheless still do not manage to detract from the overall accomplishment of
this book. It's just a shame that perfection was a whisker away, but denied because of occasional lacking in the editing department.
I do hope Will Wiles isn’t a one-trick pony; there’s the
germ of a new, original, great British voice here and goodness knows when you
look at the shortlists our establishment literary award panels come up with, we
need as many new ones as possible these days.
I’ll be looking out for him in the future with more than a little
anticipation. So give this book a go…I’m
sure you won’t be disappointed.