Review by Annabel
Now out in paperback, The Expansion Project is Pester’s first novel, published after a well-received collection of short stories; a second set, Sail Away Land, is newly published. I was recently at Blackwell’s in Oxford, where Pester interviewed M John Harrison about his new novel, The End of Everything, and he proved a quirky and interesting interviewer, particularly on discussing Harrison’s craft now he’s 80. The pair seemed to get on really well with a lot of humour between them. I’d just read Pester’s book, which was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Nero Debut Novel Award, so I was intrigued to talk to him briefly after the event. I’m now keen to read his short stories, and naturally, I hope for more novels.
Tom Crowley works at Capmeadow Business Park, where his job mostly involves writing text for signage around the building. As the novel begins, Tom is trying to get his nine-year-old daughter who is nicknamed Hen (not short for Henrietta), ready to leave the house to go with him to ‘Bring Your Daughter to Work Day’ at Capmeadow. It’s fair to say that Tom is frazzled even before they get to the front door, ‘The whole day was at the wrong angle somehow.’ They get to the station, waiting for the train. Tom is distracted by a couple arguing:
I turned my attention back to Hen. But Hen was not where I last saw her. This was classic.
‘Hen, please come back and sit down,’ I called.
She had gone to the furthest end of the platform, where it sloped down into the tracks.
I felt a surging alarm that she had got so far away. She looked tiny. A train was coming, not due to stop there, moving fast.
She was safe, but you do feel this a precursor of what’s to come. Tom is more discombobulated by it. They arrive at Capmeadow via the shuttle bus, and Tom approaches Steve on Reception to book Hen in. Steve has no record of it being ‘Bring Your Daughter Into Work Day’, but he books Hen in anyway; Tom is beginning to fret he’s got the wrong day. They reach Tom’s floor, and he parks Hen in an office and goes up the corridor to check with a colleague. Not only is he expected to attend an important town hall meeting soon, but on his return, Hen is gone, and any semblance of the day being normal is totally and utterly shattered.
This is the beginning of Tom’s mental breakdown. HR use CCTV to prove to him that he never brought Hen to work at all. But Tom can’t believe them. He spends every hour walking the halls of Capmeadow to find her, but each day the building changes – and this is where it gets really weird – for Capmeadow is expanding, seemingly all by itself – it’s edges take time to harden into place. It’s really creepy, but not in a nasty way, instead feeling that the building is alive and growing up!
The question is, who is right – HR or Tom? Where is Hen? Who is Hen? Is the Hen who went to school that day the real Hen? Pester intersperses Tom’s increasingly disturbing story with chapters from other PoVs, including the AV technician, Steve, and Tom’s boss. Steve explains:
There was a period in the aftermath of all this where he had to physically stop him coming back into the office. Despite all the evidence, he said she was still here. He was convinced he would find her somewhere in the grounds or, one time, it was the heating ducts.
Big problem for me. It would only become an HR issue if he touched the doors, you know, the biometrics would show up. So I would be out there in the garden to prevent him coming in.
There are also chapters, and footnotes from an ‘Archivist’, trying to decipher what happened some unspecified time in the future, which gives another weirder-yet angle on the whole story.
I’ll stop talking about what happens there, and mention some of the other stories that occurred to me as I was reading this. The obvious first stop is the fab TV series Severance (echoed in the paperback cover), with its uber-manipulation of its employees, and white-walled corridors that seem to lead in different directions each time until you learn the maze. I also got strong hints of Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, especially the corporate aspects of the second part, Authority, but also the way the building is itself a growing entity as in the first part, Annihilation. Ditto for Mark Z Danielewski’s labyrinthine House of Leaves to an extent. The presentation of major parts of the story by the Archivist and PoVs other than Tom’s also put me in mind of Olga Ravn’s The Employees, which consists of a series of statements by employees after an incident has happened, carefully building up a picture of what did occur. Finally there’s HR as bogeymen as in Jenni Fagan’s The Delusions.
If you’ve read or watched any of the above, you’ll likely enjoy Pester’s debut. What did surprise me though, was that although the expansion of the building is creepy, it’s not malign. It’s those who control things, i.e. management and HR, as in Severance, that really scare you, and you really feel for Tom. Pester carries off writing in the different voices really well, and I loved the quirkiness of this novel. I look forward to reading his other work.
Annabel is a co-founder and editor of Shiny New Books. She blogs at annabookbel.
Ben Pester, The Expansion Project (Granta 2026). 978-1803512594, 224pp., paperback.
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