As you can tell at once from the date of its publication, Care of Wooden Floors is a new acquisition, post-dating our Edinburgh-Manchester move. I had seen the novel on display in bookshops and been drawn to its title; then a Twitter exchange between Gregory and the author, Will Wiles, led to its purchase and arrival in our home.
Despite the fact that I was busy with events in London while I was reading this book, I finished it in about a week. It's a relatively short novel at just under 300 pages, but length doesn't really have much to do with how quickly I read a book. It can take hours just to get through the first chapter of something less absorbing, or just denser in style and content. Care of Wooden Floors, in short, is one of those novels which, once you've started, you've just got to finish, and quickly. If you share my sense of humour, you'll also be laughing out loud, even in a public place. Or perhaps especially so, if you enjoy making displays of mild exhibitionism.
The protagonist, whose name we never learn, has travelled to an also-nameless East European city to house-sit for his old university friend, Oskar. Oskar's relationship with his Californian wife, Laura, has unravelled; he has been called to Los Angeles to finalise arrangements for their divorce and, nervous about leaving his flat and cats unattended, asks his friend (whom I will call X for clarity) to help him out. Our hero arrives to find that the flat which is to be his home - and responsibility - for the next few weeks is a haven of pristine, monochrome minimalism. On the kitchen table is a letter from the absent host giving useful details of how to look after the cats (including a request to prevent them from sitting on the white leather sofa), when the cleaner will visit and, most importantly, what to do if anything should happen to the pale wooden floors of French oak which Oskar has had laid throughout and whose importance to him he is at pains to emphasise. None of this sounds too difficult, despite the fact that the cats are already on the sofa, and X looks forward finally to having the space and time to work on his novel. Writing copy for London borough councils on recycling and parking regulations leaves him little time for more literary ventures, and he is convinced that the words will flow in his new environment. What could possibly go wrong? Everything and anything, of course, as the set-up in the first chapter makes clear, and it does. As X's stay lengthens, he begins to feel micro-managed by the peremptory notes from Oskar which confront him at every turn, and a rebellious spirit sets in. X, we soon discover, also has a close relationship with alcohol, and, predictably enough, booze and minimalism don't mix.
Along the way we learn something of X and Oskar's relationship during their student days and since, including Oskar's fruitless quest to make undergraduates understand the importance of using coasters and the disasterous dinner party at which X is first introduced to Laura, his friend's soon-to-be ex-wife. X reflects on these incidents while wandering aimlessly around the city that Oskar has made his home and where he composes and conducts classical music for the local orchestra. Wiles conveys a powerful sense of the dislocation of being in an unfamiliar city, which he accentuates by not disclosing which city it is, if indeed it is a real place and not a fictional construct. X tries and fails to make the place give up its secrets, encountering only menacing dogs in canal-side wastelands, impenetrable concrete behemoths and hard-drinking locals who entice him into lap-dancing clubs. The book jacket tells us that Wiles is an "architecture and design journalist", and this comes as no surprise - he knows his Modernism from his Brutalism, and uses this knowledge to create a strong sense of space and place, both in Oskar's exquisitely-maintained apartment and its murkier environs.
Oskar, in X's words, is a man who has "fought entropy to a standstill and forced it to accept his terms". X, on the other hand, "signed an armistice" with the same long ago, as the wine stains and cigarette burns which decorate his basement flat in Clapham testify. Care of Wooden Floors weighs these two positions in the balance, asking whether it is in fact possible for human beings to fight the natural slide of objects and events into chaos, and win. The answer - it isn't - is not perhaps a surprise, but the twists and turns of events which reveal this conclusion have an exhilarating, even a bravura quality to them. We think we are watching disaster unfold and are enjoying our gasps of horror at each new development, but in the end disaster is not quite where we, X, Oskar, and his wife arrive. One of the cats and the cleaner, on the other hand - well, perhaps it's best to pretend that some things never happened.
