Scope Creep
Ben Pester, The Expansion Project
Granta, 224pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781803512587
reviewed by Robert Kiely
Tom Crowley brings his daughter to Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, and she goes missing. But all is not as it seems. Each chapter is a monologue, either by Tom Crowley or someone who works with him, such as Kath Corbett, Steve the receptionist, an unnamed Liaison Officer, an unnamed AV technician, and finally an unnamed archivist who is assembling all the material we are reading. Tom Crowley is an angry and frustrated man — we get subtle hints of this when he’s at a train station and describes someone as looking ‘punchable.’ He’s frequently swearing under his breath while speaking with his daughter. At the novel’s opening, Tom seems an unsympathetic victim, but halfway through he is using emotional blackmail against his partner. From then on he becomes a source of horror for other characters, the problem itself.
The opening hook (a missing daughter) draws the reader in, but it is also a nimble piece of misdirection. Ultimately this book is less about finding a family member than all the weirdness of a Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. That day started in the US in the 90s, and was soon extended to some companies in the UK, and then expanded to be less gender-specific. Bring Your Daughter to Work Day has something dated about it. Like the receptionist and all his co-workers, we’ve heard of it, we’ve never encountered it in real life. Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, which we mostly know from American sitcoms, is also about blurring family life and work. Those distinct roles, and how they overlap, are the book’s topic.
The project of the title is a construction project called the Capmeadow project. But no construction is really necessary, because the Capmeadow campus grows by magical means. In this way it is quite reminiscent of Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, where Area X is continuously expanding. In The Expansion Project, this is a literalisation of some of the language of Project Management. In one passing reference, the archivist refers to footage where ‘the ever-changing scope of the Capmeadow estate’ is being drawn onto people’s bodies, and this expanding scope is literalised as the Capmeadow campus keeps expanding. A good project manager knows the project’s scope (the finite outline of work that needs to be done) and doesn’t let it grow — this would be ‘scope creep’ and is always to be avoided, as every project manager knows. But in this book the project is under-defined and its edges are shrouded in mist.
This is in direct analogy to the blurring of the work/life boundary. Throughout the book people at work have bits of day-to-day life intrude, or they hallucinate that they are elsewhere. This occurs in more everyday ways too. Before even getting to work, Tom is checking his work emails on his phone. When he finally has some time with his family who he loves, he decides to message Kath at work ‘to find out if we should have a catch-up of some kind’ and gets pulled into a call on his phone.
This is a post-Lynch novel. Everything hangs together rather loosely, quasi-interconnected scenes which tease a deeper resonance. The reader is being invited to make a connection or not. Just as characters are ‘almost’ there or not quite existing, so too with the connections and deeper thread. In the golden age of audiovisual entertainment, novelists want to be directors. This novel is very visual in its delivery, its chapters are voiceovers or transcription of CCTV footage. Each chapter is less about advancing something like a plot, and more like evoking a mood.
Pester has a precise ear for the frictionless formulations of contemporary organisational life that promise progress while pointing at nothing. Characters speak in a language that is managerial but ultimately completely unmoored from reality. These empty signifiers become, in Pester’s deft hands, a source of dread rather than comedy. In doing so, it captures something true about contemporary labour — not its mechanics, but its affect: frustration as minuscule matters balloon out of all proportion, bafflement in the face of large-scale self-replicating structures which seem to be autonomous from any human decision-making.
The final sentence snaps the plot back into place, and shut, in a way which is technically virtuosic but narratively all too easy. It’s an open and shut case. The Expansion Project is a dark and lucid novel, offering not a satire of office life but a horrific riff on our inability to be fully present — at work or at home.
The opening hook (a missing daughter) draws the reader in, but it is also a nimble piece of misdirection. Ultimately this book is less about finding a family member than all the weirdness of a Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. That day started in the US in the 90s, and was soon extended to some companies in the UK, and then expanded to be less gender-specific. Bring Your Daughter to Work Day has something dated about it. Like the receptionist and all his co-workers, we’ve heard of it, we’ve never encountered it in real life. Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, which we mostly know from American sitcoms, is also about blurring family life and work. Those distinct roles, and how they overlap, are the book’s topic.
The project of the title is a construction project called the Capmeadow project. But no construction is really necessary, because the Capmeadow campus grows by magical means. In this way it is quite reminiscent of Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, where Area X is continuously expanding. In The Expansion Project, this is a literalisation of some of the language of Project Management. In one passing reference, the archivist refers to footage where ‘the ever-changing scope of the Capmeadow estate’ is being drawn onto people’s bodies, and this expanding scope is literalised as the Capmeadow campus keeps expanding. A good project manager knows the project’s scope (the finite outline of work that needs to be done) and doesn’t let it grow — this would be ‘scope creep’ and is always to be avoided, as every project manager knows. But in this book the project is under-defined and its edges are shrouded in mist.
This is in direct analogy to the blurring of the work/life boundary. Throughout the book people at work have bits of day-to-day life intrude, or they hallucinate that they are elsewhere. This occurs in more everyday ways too. Before even getting to work, Tom is checking his work emails on his phone. When he finally has some time with his family who he loves, he decides to message Kath at work ‘to find out if we should have a catch-up of some kind’ and gets pulled into a call on his phone.
This is a post-Lynch novel. Everything hangs together rather loosely, quasi-interconnected scenes which tease a deeper resonance. The reader is being invited to make a connection or not. Just as characters are ‘almost’ there or not quite existing, so too with the connections and deeper thread. In the golden age of audiovisual entertainment, novelists want to be directors. This novel is very visual in its delivery, its chapters are voiceovers or transcription of CCTV footage. Each chapter is less about advancing something like a plot, and more like evoking a mood.
Pester has a precise ear for the frictionless formulations of contemporary organisational life that promise progress while pointing at nothing. Characters speak in a language that is managerial but ultimately completely unmoored from reality. These empty signifiers become, in Pester’s deft hands, a source of dread rather than comedy. In doing so, it captures something true about contemporary labour — not its mechanics, but its affect: frustration as minuscule matters balloon out of all proportion, bafflement in the face of large-scale self-replicating structures which seem to be autonomous from any human decision-making.
The final sentence snaps the plot back into place, and shut, in a way which is technically virtuosic but narratively all too easy. It’s an open and shut case. The Expansion Project is a dark and lucid novel, offering not a satire of office life but a horrific riff on our inability to be fully present — at work or at home.