Will Wiles’ Care of Wooden Floors is published in February, with proofs available now!
Here Will introduces the book.
Ikea, the colossal flatpack furniture company, has a new slogan: “Happy Inside.” The message is pretty clear: you can fix your life by fixing up your home. Outer things can bring you inner peace. You could be happy, as long as your furniture was just right. You can see how this helps shift Ektorp sofas. But it’s twaddle. In my day job as an architecture and design journalist I see a lot of this nonsensical idea that if you can get your home just right, the rest of your life will fall into place. Care of Wooden Floors is a 300-page revenge on that idea, in which the perfect home steadily ruins a number of lives. There will be blood. Which is murder to get out of a wooden floor.
The home is an apartment in an unnamed eastern European city owned by Oskar, a minimalist composer. Oskar is a success, best known for his piece Variations on Tram Timetables, and his apartment is a triumph of minimalist interior design, all white walls, surgical steel, black leather furniture by dead Swiss architects and, yes, blond wooden floors. In this perfect environment he has planned a perfect life. But something has gone wrong. Oskar is offstage for most of the novel, having his marriage dismantled by lawyers. While he’s away, he has given his apartment to an old university friend to look after. His two cats, named after Russian composers, need feeding, after all.
Oskar’s friend edits leaflets about flytipping for a living. But he feels that if he just had the right environment, he could be something more – he could be a success, he could be happy. And housesitting for Oskar might just give him that opportunity, to break out of the squalor of his basement flat in Clapham and soar. My original intention had been to write a book about procrastination, in which someone who wants to write something is endlessly distracted, but I never quite got around to it. I found that that best way to distract my protagonist was to give him little things to do around the house. After all, I know that if I’m on a deadline, suddenly tidying my desk or doing the washing up seems like a much higher priority than whatever it is I’m meant to be doing. Very soon, this delusion that the perfect environment can make you a better person, came to dominate the story. The flatsitter is given something to do – a tiny mishap has led to an imperfection in the flat, a blemish on the wooden floor. And this draws him into a swirling vortex of catastrophe.
If you would like a proof copy, just send an email to independentthinking@harpercollins.co.uk and we will get one to you.