The Expansion Project: An Interview with Ben Pester
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The Expansion Project is your first novel but your second book after 2020’s Am I in the Right Place?. There’s something of The Expansion Project in those short stories: ‘Rachel Reaches Out’ has the same disorientated strangeness, ‘Low Energy Meeting’ is a transcript patterned with the transcriber’s interruptions. How far is this novel a continuation of the stories?
The very beginning of the novel started as a short story, but it was completely different to the book we eventually published. It was set on a business bus visiting the ruin of a celebrated business park. Even the original voice barely made it through the rewrites, but it was always a first-person monologue to camera, somebody speaking to you as you read. So weirdly that use of direct address has always been there, and it has remained the structure all along. But the original voice that was speaking is gone completely, there’s nothing left of it, only the shape of it, like a kind of mould.
So it began as a short story on a business bus. Now it’s a pretty complex book: both a nuanced portrait of domestic life and a creepy dystopian satire of work. Which of those sides came first, or did they arrive together?
They belong to each other, the home and the office, just like any satire of corporate culture I write must have its emotional basis. It’s not all ‘Haha, we’re at work, isn’t it weird being at work. Look how we talk at work hahaha.’ I don’t think that would be a good or emotionally worthwhile book to write.
I mean, there’s a part of me that finds, for example, the language that develops at work interesting. There’s a lot of things about repeated or crooked work-speech that are worth looking at, beyond just cultivating a glossary of meaninglessness. I think the repetition of new and strange words is a bit addictive. Just like inflections and accents you pick up on holiday, and vocal fry and pausing in weird places as you speak – all of these things are actually kind of addictive and it spreads around offices (or any communal space) for a reason. It seems to be comforting for humans to cultivate language like this, to identify themselves in a group. The weird thing about work is that you only really are part of that group when you’re at work or doing work-based things. The language should not follow you home.
I remember being cross at work when Google were getting rid a bit of software and the announcement said Google is ‘sunsetting’ this product. Sunsetting! You can’t have the sunset!
But I suppose after a lot of calming down, after the first instinct to ridicule the offence, I came to see that there’s another way of seeing what’s happening to that word. That actually, maybe, this awful use of the sunset is okay? Like maybe it’s community making. They’re saying the word sunset to each other, which, maybe, is lovely.
My favourite thing about doing this little exercise of telling myself it’s okay to use the sunset to describe the end of a pointless Google product is that it won’t reconcile itself, ever.
To me, corporate language will always be simultaneously pointless and horrible mush that alienates us from each other, and it will also always have an emotional resonance because it’s the formation of a language.
People trying to communicate is an essential part of drama.
Sometimes you feel sympathetic and sometimes you feel cynical, and I do this for a living as well, I work in these places, I work hard, I respect my colleagues too much to think that I’m there just for the money or to take the piss, so I get into it. I use this language too, I have to.
That’s one reason why writing the novel has been so interesting to me. I know that it’s a kind of madness to keep going back to it – to keep going back to the question – is this okay? What we’re doing here in these offices, is this good for us and the world?
The deterioration of how you are with your family at the expense of work can spread everywhere and still not resolve because you’re also proud of the fact you do it. You’re proud to be able to pay the bills, and to be able to keep your head above water.
That’s at the heart of the book, I think: this life just won’t resolve, just like some parts of the story won’t resolve. There’s just those two realities. People at work are generally really nice, it’s fine, maybe it’s fine, it’s a community; and then instantly, no of course not, look at the damage that capitalism does, look at what you’re saying, look at how long you’re here every day. And it just goes round and round.
Much of the humour in the book, including your parody of corporate jargon, depends on the play and interplay of monologuing voices: Tom, the Archivist, the Liaison Officer, Tom’s boss Cath, Steve from reception and others. The novel itself is almost entirely spoken. How close is your work to that of a screenwriter or playwright?
Firstly, I think this way of presenting the book feels right because it does that thing that I mentioned, it takes the language outside of parody, it makes it a part of how we speak to each other. Sometimes it can seem absurd to talk that way, but also you’re trying to communicate. People trying to communicate is an essential part of drama. In a story I wrote a few years ago, I was interested in the idea of reaching out. This is simultaneously an awful sort of office-speak for just writing someone an email, and yet, if you reach out physically, it’s akin to a cry for help. So that’s how that story was born.
It’s also true that I have a Masters in Screenwriting and my degree was in Drama, and I worked as a playwright for a theatre company for a bit after graduating. I guess the question really is why I ended up writing prose so much.
On my screenwriting MA I tried so hard to write a ninety-minute film and it was so difficult. That’s not even twenty-five thousand words, but it’s not the word count that’s the problem, or even the story really. I came to the conclusion that I can do almost exactly what screenwriting is, except for some reason I couldn’t quite make it something that you could actually put a camera in front of.
I feel like being able to write a short story is just the shortcut. There’s an editor, but what’s an editor compared to a producer, or an actor, or a director? An editor needs to believe in the story, but those other figures – they need to be able to pick it up and move it forward, to make it their own.
When you write a script for a feature film, you have to convince somebody to part with so much money. Like so much. Even a small budget is still a huge amount of money. And inevitably because of that certain habits have set in about writing and making films that mean there’s such an expectation, even in arthouse or independent films, to deliver an emotional pay-off. You have to show that the film will work on an emotional and spectacular level that’s worth all of this money to the person who has got to give it to you, and it’s that person you’ve really got to inspire, before any other audience.
I’m saying all of this having written a feature film screenplay in January this year that I’m actually really happy with, as well as a short film doing the rounds at the moment and another one I’m still working on. But it’s taken years. I did that MA twenty years ago, and even now when I’m working on a screenplay I feel somewhere between the headmaster’s office and a difficult client, and that’s before I’ve even started writing. There’s just something really blocking me on that, but I’ll get over it, I feel sure, eventually.
How else has your dramatic ‘background’ (for want of a better word) influenced your work?
The first engagement I had with a lot of writers, modernist and beyond, was through theatre. One of the first times I read a play without really thinking of it as school-work was when I was about 16 and I read The Accidental Death of an Anarchist by Dario Fo. I thought, ‘That’s it. This is IT!’ It was such an incredible thing.
At first I was just captivated by the behaviour of The Maniac – the way the dialogue bounces around on the page was amazing, but then once you understand that it’s clowning and that the point of it is that everything is clownable and breakable and the clowns are everywhere, all over the set, in the wings, in the pit, everywhere in that play there is a clown, then it becomes amazing. That was the first time I properly wanted to write a script. I wanted to write my version of that Dario Fo play and just try and put myself as far ahead of the joke as he was.
My writing is always political work. But I can’t offer answers. I don’t have them.
At university, I just kept going with these brilliant, funny, physical artists. I got into Beckett a little bit, but through plays, not fiction or essays. Like Krapp’s Last Tape, I did that as my final piece for my A level (which went spectacularly badly). Beckett also wrote these plays called Quad (then Quad II and so on) that were just maps, just directions around a square. So ‘Character A moves to point A, character B moves to point C, character C moves to point F’. You’re just walking in a square. I’ve done a few plays that are just that – Beckett found through the body, rather than on the page, it’s a different way to arrive at the work. And Chekhov, as well. It’s crazy to me to think of Chekhov in terms of the short story because to me that’s the guy who had arguments with Stanislavski about whether or not The Cherry Orchard was a comedy. He is plays plays plays. But then there’s a whole other plane of existence to these writers and I feel glad to have done it this way around.
Is it too obvious to compare the strange expansion of the business in the novel to Gregor Samsa’s transformation in The Metamorphosis? You and Kafka both actualise a metaphor about work: Kafka takes a man who feels like a bug and turns him into one, and in the same way you take the idea of a business ‘expanding’ and make it happen.
It’s partly too clumsy to be an analogy or a metaphor. I guess that would be a bit weaker – like if it was somehow a veiled horror story that warned of the dangers of work. The expansion makes it hard to pin down as a whole story – you only get a glimpse of it, and the idea is that the whole of it would be impossible to understand or manage, or stop.
So the analogy ends where the story becomes hard to follow in the traditional way. It’s intentionally frustrating. And that really is the thing itself. Endless expansion is terrifying and deadly, and dehumanising, and hard – impossibly hard – to put a pin into.
But the energy for writing, the impetus for the expansion, is this irreconcilable existence we have now. I found it irresistibly queasy: this idea that you don’t know where the limits are to your own life, that the walls of the prison move when you walk towards them, and, if you’ll forgive this, how strong love must be to still survive here.
There’s something gothic about the novel’s found manuscripts, the fear and dread, and its latent political critique. How far are you a political writer?
Obviously everything is politically charged. I’m pretty far to the left on most things, and would love it if they just made cars illegal. But as a writer, I’m more interested in powerlessness in the day-to-day than the larger political conversations.
This is not because I don’t think it’s important to think and act consciously in a political way, but because as a ‘political writer’ I’m not interested in persuasion or teaching. I’m also not as good at it as so many other people are. My writing is always political work. It is a warning about the condition we are in. But I can’t offer answers. I don’t have them. But I am so glad that there is a community of people who – for example – are ready to oppose genocide. To fight for the continued existence of life on Earth. I am with them. I will always be with them.
The strangeness, the lack of narrative resolution, the characters who may or may not be the same person, the mist… it’s all very Lynchian, visually and thematically. Is David Lynch a conscious influence?
Now he is, for sure. And I am aware that in a lot of ways, people like David Lynch gave life and credibility to the young weird me who was not yet good enough to make the work he wanted to make – you could feel pretty shit always having to be the outsider or the strange one. To show people an idea and see them not really get it. David Lynch in that sense really was a kind of angel. I’m not sure I would have said that at the time, but it’s true. A gateway drug to thinking outside of the rules and being okay with the inherent strangeness in my work.
If you can not hate your job to the extent that you don’t want to quit every day, then you will be able to write a bit.
But the best thing about David Lynch was how many great people were able to get money to make their weird shit thanks to his success and his cultural presence. Everyone likes to hear that something is like something else. Now people could say, ‘It’s like Twin Peaks, but funny,’ or something.
A later influence has been Atlanta, which takes a lot of the same license as Twin Peaks, but does something new and unique again. I think that series might be the best surrealist work in the last ten years on TV.
You and your sister Holly are now sibling novelists (Holly Pester’s The Lodgers was published last year). Holly began as a poet and then wrote a novel, whereas—
I’m a useless poet, if you’re driving at that. Terrible.
Are you? Lines like ‘The passion for a fight came and left like a bus moving away’ or ‘I remember the ground beneath me going soft, rolling like a sadness’ reminded me of the poet Jack Underwood, another of your contemporaries.
Jack’s a good friend and a beautiful poet. I think there’s probably just an affinity between us. Obviously I’m influenced by everybody I read, but as well as that there’s something in his expression that I understand on an almost conversational level. There’s an extra satisfaction to it because he’s using a language that we share. Although as I say this, maybe I’m just describing how it feels to read a really juicy and beautiful poet! Maybe I am trying to say that I feel very at home using what you might call poetic language, but it’s all narrative for me. It’s all serving the drama.
Are you a writer who works, or a worker who writes?
It used to be that I would work in a cinema or a warehouse or pub, and that would be a way of funding the writing. In a lot of important ways, that’s never really changed. But what I have found as I have gone on with this is you have to enjoy your job.
The landscape in this country is that you can’t just be given money to try and do creative things that will eventually make money for the economy. It’s weird that they invest in AI but not us, but okay. So then if you want to write (I won’t say ‘or make art’, ‘or act’ or whatever because I feel like those are unique things and I can’t do them so what would I know about those people need? But I do assume they need money to live because nobody in government will invest in them either), you have to find money and peace some other way.
One way of achieving that is to not hate your job. If you can not hate your job to the extent that you don’t want to quit every day, then you will be able to write a bit. If your job is killing you, then that’s a very painful place to be, and it certainly isn’t a very good condition to be writing in. Not for me anyway.
The cliché of the TV or film narrative is the person who is in the job they don’t belong in. Their boss is horrible, the people they work with are basically barely even human. There’s always something wrong with the other people, the other people are all at the end of the train of hopelessness and they’re just going to sit and rot. But there’s never anything wrong with the main character, who is just in the wrong place.
But in reality, that’s not actually what work is like at all. People aren’t there moronically. You are not the main character. Everyone you work with also has a reason to need to earn money, and loads of those reasons are way more interesting than being a writer.
The people I work with are fascinating. And I’m not saying this like I’m some creepy anthropologist of the workplace. I am not some outsider looking in, observing them. It’s because they are human people. They are mostly very nice and very interesting. That’s why it’s really important to me that the novel doesn’t slip into just ridiculing work – to take the piss out of people who need to be there.
If there’s a seeping dread in the workplaces I write about, then it’s not because there’s a herd of awful people who are more swept up in it than anyone else. It’s because we are all stuck (if we’re stuck) and the writer noticing it really is not special.
The other thing about people I work with is that generally they are hugely supportive of all this. At the end of the book I thank everybody I’ve ever worked with.
Thanks very much, Ben. I think that’s everything. Unless you had any questions for us?
Yes, actually, could you please tell me more about the challenges day to day in this role? What would I be doing on day one? What does success look like?
I don’t want to talk about it.
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Ben Pester is the author of the short story collection Am I in the Right Place? (2020). He lives in London. The Expansion Project is his first novel.
Joseph Williams is reviews editor at Critical Quarterly.
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