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Everyone has bad days (weeks, year) at work. Most of the time, those bad times are caused by other people behaving badly. In Ben Pester’s debut novel, Expansion Project, it’s the workplace itself that becomes a monster and swallows the staff. “Wires emerge from the windows of some buildings clustered like tentacles.” People blur and disappear at the edges, finding mists where they should have real locations. The title “Expansion Project” is merciless, mysterious and never explained.
Humans have started this inhuman project, but the boss is invisible. Early on, we hear that the CEO has announced the expansion, and there are references to the company’s headquarters in Texas. The archive notes state that “This headquarters is also referenced in hundreds of archive clips from the expansion meetings. For example, “When did you lose contact with your Texas office? How long has it been since you dialed these meetings?”
Some kind of guide is a future archivist with no name for Capmeadow Business Park, all-seeing. Everyone on the ever-growing campus is faintly monitored, monitored and heard with archival footage and audio testimony. Employees live first in a hotel and then in a chalet. “Inbound Architecture Growth Services” workers said:
The central figure is Tom Crowley, a mid-level worker who starts with a recognizable family life (wife, two children) and designs training materials, as long as they exist. He seems to be a classic and everyone, and he always feels that work is an unproductive use of his time. “Of course I was good at my job and lost the urge to run away that I was very enthusiastic when I was young.
The story begins with Tom taking his young daughter Hen with a capmeadow on a day “take your daughter to work.” When they arrive at the main reception, after a stressful journey, no one has a record of such an event. The hen will disappear soon. “I never found her again,” Tom says in one of his recordings. Hen’s quest and increased alienation of Tom from all sorts of normality exists throughout the book. There’s a twist, and it’s not the last time we hear of chickens, but it’s the last of something approaching a “normal” office environment. Tom, we eventually leave his family from the recording and spend the rest of his life inside Capmeadow.
Pester, who published the short floor collection, am I in the right place? (2021), who worked as a technical writer for a day, and in a recent article in Quietus, he discussed the process of creating an expansion project and the music he listened to while doing it. Pester said, “Many of my writing at work (is) at lunchtime during work week requires music urgently for writing at work, as a means of changing reality, opening emotional doorways, and to own the sounds of the dining room. In the closed world of novels, he managed to create the extreme “own death” of the normal sounds of human life and activities.
I appreciate the well-executed vision of the Pester’s true soul-sucking workplace, but I needed more structure to cling to. Others will taste this vision of corporate life, as influenced by the kind of doctor of dark fantasy, or as influenced by ideas that began centering around “Psychic Albion” in the second half of the 20th century. The magical, informed folk horror, the feeling of half a glass of something that is sometimes perfect. A world that is invisible with everyday linear British life.
And all of us, whether magic or not, can be blurred at the edges by all-consuming work, like residents who enjoy 24/7 support and happiness at the Capmeadow business park. Don’t stick your fingers on Data Lake or go to the 45th floor (“Were there an infamous event, there was a leak there”). And don’t ask why.
Expansion project by Ben Pester Grant £16.99, 224 pages
Isabel Berwick, an IT editor at which FT works and author of “The Future-Proof-Proof Career,” will speak at the FTWeekend Festival held at Kenwood House Gardens in London on Saturday, September 6th. For the path, please visit ft.com/festival
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