The Expansion Project​ is Ben Pester’s first novel. There is little about its opening that hints at the weirdness of the imagination which created it, though a reader familiar with Pester’s short stories may have some suspicions. The title story of Am I in the Right Place? (2020) features a ‘Mondelux single-man-in-a-bedsit oven with rotisserie setting’ that turns out to be a portal to childhood memories. In ‘Lifelong Learning’, from the same collection, a person at a party climbs into a kitchen cupboard to escape an abusive flatmate and finds a ‘one-time hole’ leading to a utopian community known as ‘the village’. And then there’s ‘Mother’s Day Card from a Wooden Object’: ‘Perhaps you’re wondering why I have chosen this moment to send this card – which, as you know, I cannot actually send or write in a physical sense because I am entirely made of wood.’

One could say that the novel is about a man who loses his mind at work, but that’s not really right, because the categories of ‘man’, ‘mind’ and ‘work’ are somehow looser and more porous than one might expect. The man’s name is Tom Crowley. We meet him on his way to work at the Capmeadow business park, accompanied by his eight-year-old daughter, Hen. It’s Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, or Crowley thinks it is. Hen is not short for Henrietta, the child explains to ‘Steve from reception’. Actually she was named on account of her ‘hen-headedness’: when she was a baby her head was as narrow as a chicken’s.

Crowley is prone to panic and sudden rages; he clings on to sanity through parenthood: ‘My children, since they were born, have been a miraculous way for me to confirm that I am all right. I certainly couldn’t have said it before they arrived. I was not all right.’ Their existence, however, is sometimes itself a source of panic and rage. The mundane details that unfold could be lifted from any stressed father’s morning routine: an untidy kitchen, train station croissants, a frantic scroll through unread emails, a lost napkin. But it’s within the mundane that Pester lodges (or dislodges) the strangest things. Many of his characters experience some version of being en route to work when they find themselves on the cusp of slipping through a portal into an alternate universe. In ‘All Silky and Wonderful’, a man on a train wakes from a doze to learn that his carriage is about to be decoupled from the rest of the train because a set of ‘expressive teal leather luggage’ abandoned by its owner is emanating a ‘bone-level sense of doom’. ‘Please don’t decouple me!’ he cries. ‘You don’t understand – I’ve got to run a workshop.’

For Crowley, the difficulty is how to be a person who goes to work, and also a father and a husband, when work is in many ways hostile to real human connection, a place where language is ‘messaging’ and emotions are unprofessional. The Capmeadow liaison officer explains:

Whenever they seem to be about to talk about something they are forbidden to mention (not forbidden, I apologise, this word has crept into my language recently and I think it’s because one of my team used to work in the copywriting division; there has been a spread, only a mild one, of off-message language – so, not forbidden but non-accepted), something gently happens to move them back onto a more appropriate track. Certain topics cannot be discussed with me for data and privacy reasons. There are counsellors and things like that for very personal issues.

The daily grind of parenthood brings different challenges, but these are more than compensated for by transcendent love. Crowley observes his daughter passing through his workplace:

As always, she moved as a different shape to the people around her, brighter and more fluid than any other form in the office. At least, this is how I saw her. It’s fairly difficult to know how the rest of the world would have seen it, but to me, she was like a blaze in the presence of others.

Of course, work and family have always been inextricably intertwined, as Crowley acknowledges: ‘I might as well be honest and say I was never good at my job. Until it was for them, I never had a single second at work that felt like a productive use of my time. Not here, not in any of my jobs before this one.’ In Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, an occasion that probably doesn’t exist, he seems to have hallucinated a merging of his two roles, a fantasy that both occurs and doesn’t occur, during which Hen goes irrevocably missing but also turns out to have been at school the whole time.

Pester’s satirical and surreal scrutiny pushes the concept of the ‘work-life balance’ to its limit. Crowley’s job is to produce his company’s messaging: ‘Little messages to help people feel good about their work. Like “we succeed together”, or something like that,’ he tells Hen. Several of the short stories also involve strange happenings in an office environment. The most striking of these, ‘☺ If yes, please explain your answer ☺’, involves the arrival of a large green and lilac egg at a corporate workplace. It ‘instantly changes the atmosphere in the office’ and creates ‘an immense feeling of common purpose in the whole company’. Bring Your Egg to Work Day, perhaps. The egg hatches into an indescribable gender-fluid creature that the company’s employees name ‘Tritty’.

Capmeadow is a dystopia masquerading as a utopia, a sprawling complex of offices, accommodation, restaurants, shops and recreational spaces. There’s a Resilience Garden (‘it’s a shame … to see signs of desperation in such a tranquil space’), a Museum of Life and a secret night market where employees have side hustles selling fake artisanal wares. The business park is in a state of continual construction and is surrounded by a mysterious fog; the complex can only be reached by a shuttle bus that makes ‘the sound of string instruments in the cold’. Its perimeter creeps sleazily into the surrounding landscape, where its edges ‘glisten and have a slight odour … If you look closely, the way it reproduces itself is like breathing.’ The Capmeadow expansion also encroaches on the psychic space of its employees. Crowley feels ‘the swell of a meeting room’ while walking his daughter home from school; he finds ‘the carpet in the corridor that led from my office floor to the lifts’ under his feet during a visit to a castle in his home town. Children in the Capmeadow crèche engage in a ‘very kind of work-based play’; ‘they were explaining that they too were incredibly, unbelievably stressed, they kept saying bloody hell why can’t I focus? Why can’t I focus for just ten seconds? And there were some pretend mushrooms and they all said we should eat lion’s mane … although of course it was just some bits of air.’

The Expansion Project has echoes of texts such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (for the institutional sci-fi) and the plays of Sarah Kane (for the howling emptiness bumping up against banality). But Pester’s fiction is its own beast. You have to wonder where he gets his ideas. ‘He had a very dusky bottom,’ the speaker of his story ‘How They Loved Him’ reminisces. She’s relating an anecdote about how she and her ageing husband picked up a migrant worker outside Wickes, a DIY retailer, to fill in a ‘puckering’, ‘sucking’ hole that had appeared in their living room. They later coerce the man into having sex with them. ‘I’ve always found Jonathan’s tongue a bit embarrassing, in the intimate sense … Uncontrolled – Labradorian!’ It’s from the same school of dark – let’s call it beyond the pale – humour as TV programmes such as The League of Gentlemen or the podcast Dear Joan and Jericha. English niceties become a coffin lid that creaks open to reveal something horrifying. ‘He got this long smooth erection, very quickly,’ the narrator recalls. ‘It was really long but not very wide, like a kind of whistle. Very noble actually. I stroked it for a while, and then leaned over and popped it in my mouth. Very strong tasting, it was. Hard work will do that to a glans.’ I walk past a Wickes most days and Pester’s story often lurches into my mind. Can you imagine having the phrase ‘strong-tasting penis’ intruding into your thoughts regularly?

There is less of this sort of thing in The Expansion Project, but there are plenty of other weirdnesses. As the novel progresses, we realise that this is not a straightforward narrative but a series of audio (and audiovisual) transcripts in the process of being catalogued by a confused archivist who isn’t entirely sure who they work for or when all this material dates from. Like everyone else, the archivist is unravelling, confused about whether shoals of fish swimming in the data lake are responsible for the degrading of the archival footage: ‘What else are they eating if not this essence? … Would it cause a reaction to the skin of an archived image, to be grazed on by a pale white fish, floating in there with your data?’

In addition to the archivist, we hear the voices of an AV technician, the liaison officer, Steve from reception and Cath Corbett, a colleague of Crowley’s. Most of the characters are in some form of distress, which fades in and out of focus – partly because the characters are in a state of dissociation, and partly because the quality of the audiovisual material, which after all may have been nibbled by fish, varies. Steve from reception compares himself to ‘a sick egg’. ‘Things were bad,’ he admits. ‘I’d been living, like, on the surface of my life.’ In meetings, Cath Corbett appears ‘to switch between states of managerial directness and tremendous pain’. The AV technician’s sciatica sends him into an existential crisis: ‘I wonder if anyone else in this room is in pain like this. Just at this moment there must be two thousand people in the audience, and twenty times that on various meeting screens and in other offices around the world. Is anyone, in any of those rooms, I wonder, as close to the brink of agony as I am?’ The only character who seems largely free of existential dread is the liaison officer. It’s her job to listen to the concerns of others, but she doesn’t respond to them; her colleagues’ anxieties are merely ‘collected as feedback’.

This is not a cheerful book, but it is a funny one. The corporate attempt to suppress and compartmentalise human feeling is repeatedly shown to be laughable. But pain is non-compliant; in a way, its resistance to control is a kind of saving grace. Like Crowley’s analogy for the rare text messages he receives from his son (‘jewels mined out of rock’), our encrypted feelings can never be abolished by capitalist imperatives. They will emerge one day out of a fog of dissociation – in the middle of a meeting, on the train, on the way to run a workshop – and un-numb us back to life.