A novel set around the trials of a London lifestyle journalist in freefall might suggest a punishing read. Set over a week in the bleakest season of the year, against a drop curtain of an optically baffling miasma, everything is on a downward trajectory into chaos, in which misunderstandings will be by far the least menacing element. As Jack, our hero, says, 'Tell enough lies, or a big enough lie, and the truth gets corrupted. The boundary gets lost, it rots.' Corrosion is the theme in Will Wiles' Plume - of trust, of physique, of structures, of certainties. Derailment and disturbance, whether emerging under the long shadow of AI or the skewed perspectives of psycho-geography, are the ubiquitous drivers.
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