\u201cI knew she wouldn\u2019t leave the floor, but still I felt the slow panic coming on. A supermarket form of dread \u2013 you expect to find the lost child in the next aisle, but the next aisle is empty, so you push on to the next \u2026 [until] there are not enough aisles left to give you hope.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tom Crowley\u2019s 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\u2019s workplace, Capmeadow Business Park. It\u2019s bring your daughter to work day, and it\u2019s not the first time that morning that he\u2019s lost her. But this feels different \u2013 to Tom, and to the reader, who might briefly suspect that they are in a contemporary update of Ian McEwan\u2019s The Child in Time.<\/p>\n
Tom soon finds Hen, then loses her again \u2013 \u201cproperly gone this time\u201d \u2013 or doesn\u2019t. She is nowhere to be found on Capmeadow\u2019s 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\u2019t find it, and no one else seems to have heard of it. When confronted with the evidence, he eventually signs a corporate-Stalinist affidavit \u201cofficially agreeing\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The collapse of Tom\u2019s sense of stable reality \u2013 of the boundaries between physical and digital \u2013 lies in wait for us all<\/p>\n
Ben Pester\u2019s 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 \u201cArchivist\u201d who is meant to be studying the business park\u2019s \u201cExpansion Project\u201d but keeps getting drawn into individual lives such as Tom\u2019s, and thus becomes an accidental practitioner of \u201chistory from below\u201d. It shares the collection\u2019s office setting and surrealist approach: Am I in the Right Place? could just as easily have been the title of the novel.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Help Wanted<\/a>), technical writers\u2019 collectives (Joseph O\u2019Neill\u2019s Godwin<\/a>) or tidal-energy startups (Alexander Starritt\u2019s Drayton and Mackenzie<\/a>). The world of work seems to have supplanted marriage and the family as the place where novelists examine questions of identity and relationships.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cengineering division\u201d, and Cath Corbett, who may or may not be his boss, describes him as a \u201ccontent specialist\u201d), 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cmindfulness apps\u201d and dehumanising HR, presiding over a\u00a0\u201cmanagerial class\u201d who wear expensive suits and drink \u00a310 bottles of still water, runs dangerously close to cliche \u2013 cliches that rehearse the prejudices of the novel\u2019s putative readership. Pester\u2019s rendering of corporate-bureaucratic language (\u201cforbidden\u201d becomes \u201cnon-accepted\u201d, and so on) also feels rather commonplace.<\/p>\n The destabilising power of The Expansion Project is not satirical \u2013 at least not in the comic sense. That power lies, firstly, in Pester\u2019s protagonist. Ultimately defeated, Tom Crowley thinks that his family see him as a \u201cpainless wound\u201d, 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 \u2013 giver and recipient.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Inside Saturday<\/p>\n The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n But, as we learn over the course of the novel, he is the canary in the data mine. The total collapse of Tom\u2019s sense of stable, known reality \u2013 of the boundaries between physical and digital, memory and dream, work and life \u2013 lies in wait for the other characters, and for us. The landscape of Capmeadow \u2013 \u201ccloud-forestry\u201d visible through the windows, a sculpture-filled Resilience Garden \u2013 is only a logical extension of an AI-generated Zoom background. The\u00a0Expansion Project is less an indictment of late capitalism than a\u00a0horror story about screen society, in which sensations are constant and images refuse to separate into the real and imagined.<\/p>\n