It all began with a bang in Barking

This sharp satire finds a soft target in the gentrification of London. By Sam Kitchener

IPLUME by Will Wiles 352pp, Fourth Estate, £16.99, ebook £9.99

n 1917, a blast at a munitions factory in Silvertown, now part of the London Borough of Newham, laid waste to much of the surrounding docklands. Silvertown is one of those previously disdained areas of London beloved of so-called psychogeographers: writers such as Iain Sinclair, Will Self and Peter Ackroyd, who explore the city’s occult, proletarian, and criminal history in rebellion against sanitised official accounts. A similar blast in London’s docklands provides the opening to Will Wiles’s third novel, a cleareyed and frequently very funny satire on psychogeography’s false solaces. “The whole ideological project [of ] tracing out the

London of the Kray twins and the industrial past as a revolt against the corporate takeover of…”, complains one character, tailing off in bemused frustration.

But Plume is also a satire on gentrified London, written with sympathy for those seeking consolation in outsider histories. At the centre of the book is Tamesis (from the Latin name for the Thames), a new app, invented by a man called Quin or “FAQ”, which operates as a smartphone psychogeographer, nudging users towards neglected spots.

Among these users is narrator “Jack Bick”, the byline of James Bickerton, a 30-something journalist who graduated from his respectable upbringing in the provinces to writing interviews for a glossy magazine based in the East End, changing his name to something that sounds “more like a

Vice writer” along the way. He lives in a poorly maintained basement flat in Pimlico, struggles to conceal his alcoholism, and fails to conceal his resentment at fellow Londoners, such as his upstairs neighbours Bella and Dan, who either through inherited wealth or blithe inhumanity contrive to find living in the capital easy. Bick’s excellent nickname for men like Dan is “Mumfords”.

The explosion at a Barking fuel depot, whose shockwaves Bick feels during an editorial conference, presages a personal crisis. Bick is haunted by the environmental effects of the plume of smoke left behind by the disaster – the smell of burning he can taste as “thick scorched tar at the back of my mouth” – which no one else seems to notice. These stymie his desperate attempts to hold on to his job, where the missed deadlines and Stella Artois-induced late starts have started to build up.

For reasons obscure to Bick, Quin arranges for him to interview Oliver Pierce, a cult author and erstwhile proponent of psychogeography, whose published account of his own mugging, Night Traffic, transformed him into a breakout literary celebrity; in a nod to Will Self ’s use of the word on TV, Pierce becomes the first person to say “epiphenomenal” on The One Show.

When Pierce confesses that he entirely fabricated the mugging, he gifts Bick a scoop that might help shore up his employment. But Bick loses his recording of the confession, and is forced to pursue the eccentric author as he embarks on further kamikaze explorations of London’s criminal underbelly.

Wiles’s previous two novels had well-sustained satirical premises. Care of Wooden Floors (2012) is about a housesitting that spirals out of control; The Way Inn (2014) is a horror story set in a chain hotel.

Here, though, his argument – that the messiness of lives like Bick’s is what makes London so attractive to investors and developers – is almost too neat. The final chapter is dominated by a Bond villain-esque monologue in which Quin explains Bick’s relevance to his corporate master plan in helpful detail. Wiles’s caricatures are carefully argued, rather than vivid in the style of Martin Amis’s best fiction.

His targets are often soft enough: the cost of living in the capital; the malign vacuity of corporate PR; our collective obsession with social media. What distinguishes Wiles is the depth of feeling behind his satire, a quality perhaps informed by his experience as a glossy magazine journalist, and his writing about his own alcoholism.

The book is most persuasive when detailing Bick’s quotidian struggle with addiction – or as he calls it, “The Need”. When

Bick says that he “wanted to be one of the guys cheerfully necking one beer to wash down a £15 burger at 11pm, talking about boxsets and exhibitions”, the yearning conveyed is as precise as the contempt.

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