The Expansion Project by Ben Pester review

The Guardian

4 days ago

'I knew she wouldn't leave the floor, but still I felt the slow panic coming on. A supermarket form of dread – you expect to find the lost child in the next aisle, but the next aisle is empty, so you push on to the next … [until] there are not enough aisles left to give you hope.'
Tom Crowley's eight-year-old daughter Hen (not her real name, but also not short for Henrietta) has gone missing, somewhere in the Piranesi-esque corridors of Tom's workplace, Capmeadow Business Park. It's bring your daughter to work day, and it's not the first time that morning that he's lost her. But this feels different – to Tom, and to the reader, who might briefly suspect that they are in a contemporary update of Ian McEwan's The Child in Time.
Tom soon finds Hen, then loses her again – 'properly gone this time' – or doesn't. She is nowhere to be found on Capmeadow's entry records or CCTV, because she may never have been there in the first place. Tom is convinced that he had an email about bring your daughter to work day, but he can't find it, and no one else seems to have heard of it. When confronted with the evidence, he eventually signs a corporate-Stalinist affidavit 'officially agreeing' that he never brought Hen to Capmeadow. But he continues to believe that he did, and becomes a kind of living ghost stalking the business park.
Ben Pester's first novel, following his 2021 story collection Am I in the Right Place?, is formally a collage, put together decades or centuries in the future by an unnamed 'Archivist' who is meant to be studying the business park's 'Expansion Project' but keeps getting drawn into individual lives such as Tom's, and thus becomes an accidental practitioner of 'history from below'. It shares the collection's office setting and surrealist approach: Am I in the Right Place? could just as easily have been the title of the novel.
Workplace novels are everywhere. It is to fiction, rather than journalism, that we can turn for fine-grained accounts of life in big-box stores (Adelle Waldman's Help Wanted), technical writers' collectives (Joseph O'Neill's Godwin) or tidal-energy startups (Alexander Starritt's Drayton and Mackenzie). The world of work seems to have supplanted marriage and the family as the place where novelists examine questions of identity and relationships.
The Expansion Project is an office novel of a very different kind, as abstract as, say, Help Wanted is concrete. If it can seem as though Pester has no interest in what Tom actually does (he works in the 'engineering division', and Cath Corbett, who may or may not be his boss, describes him as a 'content specialist'), or in what the Expansion Project entails (we learn little about Capmeadow and nothing at all about the firms presumably based there), then that is the point.
There are costs to this level of abstraction. A novel about every workplace risks being one about no actual workplace. Capmeadow, with its line managers and endless emails and 'mindfulness apps' and dehumanising HR, presiding over a 'managerial class' who wear expensive suits and drink £10 bottles of still water, runs dangerously close to cliche – cliches that rehearse the prejudices of the novel's putative readership. Pester's rendering of corporate-bureaucratic language ('forbidden' becomes 'non-accepted', and so on) also feels rather commonplace.
The destabilising power of The Expansion Project is not satirical – at least not in the comic sense. That power lies, firstly, in Pester's protagonist. Ultimately defeated, Tom Crowley thinks that his family see him as a 'painless wound', to be tolerated but not thought about. The reader knows better. From his struggles to convert the overpowering love he feels for his children into competent parenting, to his attempts to survive and contribute at Capmeadow, Tom is all pain – giver and recipient.
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But, as we learn over the course of the novel, he is the canary in the data mine. The total collapse of Tom's sense of stable, known reality – of the boundaries between physical and digital, memory and dream, work and life – lies in wait for the other characters, and for us. The landscape of Capmeadow – 'cloud-forestry' visible through the windows, a sculpture-filled Resilience Garden – is only a logical extension of an AI-generated Zoom background. The Expansion Project is less an indictment of late capitalism than a horror story about screen society, in which sensations are constant and images refuse to separate into the real and imagined.
The Expansion Project by Ben Pester is published by Granta (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.