Ben Pester’s dark satire on the world of work

The Expansion Project, the debut novel by the London-based writer Ben Pester, begins on “bring your daughter to work day” – except, as its narrator, Tom Crowley, claims, everything is “at the wrong angle”. Tom, a communications officer, makes a fraught commute to his workplace with his eight-year-old in tow, only to arrive and discover that he alone is aware of the event. Then, leaving her unsupervised in the maze-like building, he loses her – seemingly for ever.

In this dystopian world of work, Pester toes the line between normality and surrealism. Details from mundane office life – the tinny acoustics and blinding lighting – are alarmingly augmented, while the artificiality of the place takes on a sinister edge. Going through a “period of great and exciting change”, Capmeadow Business Park is supernaturally growing into its surrounding areas, the matrix’s new peripheries “spongy underfoot” and “chewed at the edges”.

This unbridled development also tampers with spatial and temporal dimensions, to the extent that employees are no longer sure what time it is, and whether they’re at work or at home.

The premise risks becoming an easy allegory for skewed work-life balances, but the result is much richer. Pester’s novel is made up of confessional testimonies from a cross-section of Capmeadow employees (recounted to a disembodied voice), all equally delirious, their versions of events rife with inconsistencies.

There is Tom himself, who admits he abandoned his daughter, nicknamed Hen, to attend the chief executive’s meeting (“the same way a smoker has to smoke, I had to be there”). But, faced with CCTV footage contesting his account, he is strong-armed into agreeing that he never brought Hen at all.

Then there is receptionist Steve, who questions Tom’s sanity, though his feeble search-party efforts involve roaming the dimly lit service corridors mumbling “chicken” and “little girl”. Encountering his former manager, retired long ago, Steve is convinced the corridors are frequented by phantasms from the company’s past.

And finally there is the enigmatic Capmeadow archivist – bearing reports complete with unhelpful, but foreboding footnotes – who further sketches out the labyrinthine premises and its dubious goings-on.

As in his first short story collection, Am I in the Right Place?, Pester mines the awkwardness and weirdness of workplace dynamics to disturbing effect. Tom is instructed to write “reassurances for writhing and screaming incidents”, and, despite a constant screaming sound, a veneer of professionalism prevents anyone from probing too far. Pester’s deceptively lucid prose mocks office platitudes but also gets to the crux of the loneliness and alienation bred by corporate language and spaces.

At times, its meditations on the all-consuming void of work can feel heavy-handed or unrelentingly bleak, but The Expansion Project – part sci-fi, part office satire – is lifted by its stabs of dark humour.

With a steely commitment to its outlandish form and plot, Pester’s novel is as nebulous, mind-bending and delightfully strange as the workplace it describes.

The Expansion Project by Ben Pester is published by Granta (£16.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £15.29. Delivery charges may apply

Photograph portrait of Ben Pester by Caitlin Mogridge