Tom Crowley probably wouldn’t describe himself as a careerist but he certainly puts in the hours. His workplace is the (literally) rapidly expanding Capmeadow Business Park, where his job description somewhat vaguely encompasses office briefs and content strategy. He’s also a husband and father, and suspects he’s inadequate at both. In The Expansion Project by Ben Pester, we enter a Kafkaesque horror story, beginning the day that Tom takes his 8-year-old daughter, Hen, into Capmeadow and loses her (or believes he does) in its labyrinthine interiors. In a surreal 21st century corporate dystopia, Tom’s work-life balance goes seriously and sinisterly awry.
The story opens on Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, a day that already feels, to Tom, as if it’s set at the wrong angle somehow. He’s tired, the kitchen’s a mess, and Hen is being vexatious. Her child’s curiosity and propensity to cause spillages and stickiness irritates him, plus she almost causes him to mislay his work laptop. By the time they arrive at the office, his nerves are thoroughly jangled, ‘unbelievable the stress of this already!’.
The receptionist on duty is unaware that there is such an event as Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. There’s no record of it at all and when Tom checks his emails, he seems to have permanently deleted the invitation. Come to think of it, he hasn’t seen any other children.
Shortly after that, Hen vanishes from the building’s lobby. She will reappear, disappear and then be found safely at home. In fact, Tom will sign an official statement acknowledging as much, but he never truly believes it to be so, and the subsequent years of his employment at Capmeadow become very weird indeed.
Pester’s clever commentary on the modern workplace portrays a world where personal and professional lives bleed into each other. We receive snippets from the Capmeadow archives, interviews and observations from other employees across an unspecified time span, some of them interwoven into Tom’s own story. Each and every one contains an account of mental confusion; professional conversations that are hijacked by subconscious domestic thoughts, strange pervasive mists and the ever-morphing contours of the business park as new buildings and structures proliferate around its edges. In a bid to become a giant in the world of business parks, Capmeadow is anticipating their employees every personal need and want. Soon it will hardly be worth bothering to go home at night.
Fiendishly absurdist, The Expansion Project is also a distinctly uneasy read. Capmeadow’s endless corridors lure and disorientate, its glaring lights hypnotise, not to mention those eery mists, noticed by more than one witness and drawing a chilling observation.
‘I had the feeling I could see other people in the mist, small like children. They didn’t seem real and could easily have been the beginnings of new bollards. There are no children, I remember that. But I felt sure that once there had been many of them…’
Meanwhile, a benumbed Tom decides to focus on his role in the Capmeadow world.
An excellent debut novel from a writer to watch.
The Expansion Project by Ben Pester is published by Granta Books, 224 pages.
