6 days ago
This debut novel is a tour de force in surrealist comedy
The Expansion Project is Ben Pester's debut novel, which follows his short-story collection, Am I in the Right Place?, published in 2021. Much like his stories, The Expansion Project is fixated on technology, anxiety and work – common subjects in contemporary literature, yet in Pester's voice they are rendered fresh, sublime and eerie. He could be described, in part, as a comic descendant of J G Ballard, or an English version of the great absurdist Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, who gets at the humorous core of modernisation in his novels.
The book opens with the morning routine of Tom Crawley, a grumpy and loving middle-class dad who lives in the suburbs of an unspecified city. He's trying to make his daughter, Hen, eat cereal; when she doesn't, he buys her a croissant on the way to his office in Capmeadow Business Park, for 'Bring Your Daughter to Work Day'. His is the sort of job that sounds like it would be swallowed by AI in a gulp: he writes prompts for manual illustrations, as well as corporate copy. He accidentally leaves his sausage roll on the platform at the railway station – a significant detail, as it becomes increasingly questioned whether Tom can trust his own memory, and us him as a protagonist.
When Tom gets to the office, no one knows about 'Bring Your Daughter to Work Day'; there are no other children and Tom can't even find the email about it. He tries to entertain Hen himself, but on leaving her alone to go to the lavatory, she goes missing. Colleagues help to look for her, but soon try to convince him she hasn't been there at all, and that Tom is simply experiencing a 'false memory'.
Thankfully, Hen is at school when Tom goes to pick her up – at his colleague's insistence – but here he finds that she keeps 'moving her head somehow, not wildly, but something about it meant I couldn't see her – not all of her face at the same time'. He continues to look for her at Capmeadow, leaving bits of croissant around the site in case she's hungry, and starts to wonder if she's in the heat ducts and plant pots until he's removed from work and forced to stay at home.
Pester is a talented writer of the surreal. During his search for Hen, Capmeadow expands in the physical sense – 'there was now more street than there had been before' – and suddenly there are new noodle bars, waffle houses and self-contained pods for staff to sleep in; 'complicated walls of ducts and pipes that seemed to burst out and return to the building like worms'. When a dog strays into 'the zone' and chews at these walls, 'slowly the chewed-on ground heals and grows over itself'. Here, I visualised London's Barbican made out of elephant flesh; the messy expansiveness of Ballard's apartment building in High-Rise; as well as the hermetic tech hubs of Silicon Valley, which have their own gyms and bars.
Besides Tom, we also see Capmeadow through the eyes of other characters – a technique that never allows us to escape the claustrophobia of Capmeadow. There's a crèche supervisor who doesn't know how long she has been there, only that she has eaten several meals. Such perspectives are cut through with extracts and footnotes by an archivist who is watching and listening to footage of the characters and gives us commentary on the sound quality of the files, which seem to be deteriorating or changing as they play.
Much of The Expansion Project is about the bewildering and relatively new experience of being online. I often feel that descriptions of characters texting and scrolling in realist novels are inadequate at capturing that feeling: allegory and metaphor are needed here, to help us understand something evolving too rapidly for us to process. Pester gets this, and uses such tools in his work to great and strange effect. Capmeadow itself is an allegorical space, an online feeling rendered grossly physical and multi-dimensional. Data is described as an organic, water-like substance people are tempted to drink.
There's also no concrete mystery to be solved around Hen's disappearance: she's simply both there and not there, much like all of us – everyone with a smartphone is in two or more places at once. The Expansion Project is a novel about dislocation that feels dislocating. It should serve as an ominous warning to us all.
★★★★★
