Am I In The Right Place? by Ben Pester
Review by Jess Moody
‘Everything that is happening to you is real’
Ben Pester’s debut short story collection is full of holes. Lurking between the thresholds of rooms, or tripping time when your attention wanes. They are places of strange power or revulsion: filling the negative space in the middle of a corporate hotel, or emanating from teal-leather luggage in a train carriage. They are the hauntings unsaid in team meetings. The threat of a falling white goods. These holes salivate patiently in floorboards. They are the time Before. They are the spaces where a sense of certainty goes.
At first glance Am I In the Right Place? is a collection of smart stories of surreal satire on modern life. Teasingly, the opening piece is entitled ‘Orientation’, a perfectly observed mockery of a temp worker’s induction process. The feeling of having missed some essential information slowly, oh so slowly, sets to unravelling facades of normality, to the point that a stationery cupboard becomes the space where no one hears you scream. From then on in the reader knows the only direction we’re going in, is deeper down the rabbit hole.
Office culture, with all its equivocations and corporate newspeak, provides the scaffolding for most of Pester’s imaginings. In ‘Rachel reaches out’ a young worker may or may not have just insulted a colleague by email as she undergoes a strange metamorphosis. The firm in ‘😊If yes, please explain your answer😊’ unites its employees in the shared honour of caring for a possibly monstrous egg. Meeting rooms, work trips, guest speakers all provide a scaffolding of a certain type of accepted productive artificiality which the author skewers with the fantastic and a ‘bone-level sense of doom’. The domestic has its place too, though; post-apocalyptic ravings about kitchen extensions and Ottolenghi; the darkening desires of Daily-Mail types and a Wickes carpark. The scrubbing of minted bleach on floors and stairs as the holes grow and grow…
The journeys of these protagonists are dreamlike in their surrealism, yes; full of nagging warpings of reality on journeys filled with long curving corridors, buildings growing new floors, time-leaps, and sudden surfacings of childhood truths. Yet the author knows the real unease is both the dream that feels real, and the reality that you dread is a dream no more. There’s a surety and physicality to Pester’s world-building. It’s specific, recognisable: embodied in a detailed technical architecture of mostly indoor spaces, sites of trespass and entrapment. There is as much attention paid to an office staff-room (‘There is a dirty mark where someone has peeled away a sticker’…) or an upper middle-class kitchen (‘..a tin sign that says, Northern Soul, Keep the Faith’) as to the everyday and not-so-everyday events within these walls. It’s this grounding that makes for such unsettling reading; an understanding that you are indeed disorientated in the familiar, uncertain of the rules.
‘ “You want me to just pretend?”
“Improvise, yes. Or enact.”’
In the collection as a whole, the reader is somewhat uncertain of the boundaries between tales. Many stories share a sense of an ‘off screen’ known catastrophe unfurling, but perhaps not the same one. There is more than one mention of a generic ‘partner’ and ‘kids’, alongside specific London street references. There’s the older millennial’s precarious tightrope between childhood memory and the illogicality of adulthood. And yes, those holes… Yet just when you might suspect some constant, or correlation, Pester is ready to tip the balance: to pull the rug with the strangeness of where stories will go. See the title story ‘Am I In the Right Place?’, a terrifically observed awkward restaurant lunch between a grown-up son and his estranged father. Just one trip to the bathroom and back seemingly clips time and tone, leaving a cold sinking mystery of abandonment, violent enemies, and a fairy-tale nightmare of an ending.
There is experiment here in form too: bullet point laughter; emails and PC notifications; transcribed ‘found footage’; confrontations of dark pages. One piece is a reminiscence from a piece of wood which may have been someone’s son; another places us as spectres in a doomsday audience. The variety and shifts in narrative style are playful, disruptive, daring.
The result is an unnerving, intelligent, very funny, and often horrific labyrinth of contemporary unease. With this collection, we meet a writer with the skill and confidence to capture the disquiet of disintegrating truths. It’s the right time, and the right place, for such leaps and scrabblings at the edge of possibility.
Am I In The Right Place? is published by Boilerhouse Press, May 6th 2021