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Mr Phillips
John Lanchester
Faber & Faber hardback, 247 pages, £16.99
Published April 2000
ISBN 057120161X
Review by Gerald Houghton (2000)

Mr Phillips goes off to town because town – work – is what Mr Phillips does. Only today, July 31st 1995, Mr Phillips has no work. Wilkins and Co, regretfully, had to let him go. But Mr Phillips, the accounts department number-cruncher, has not told Mrs Phillips or their youngest, Thomas. Which is why he leaves his modest south of the river address, on time each morning, briefcase in hand.

It would be wrong to call what Mr Phillips does with his day an adventure. Things happen, he sees things he would never see as a working stiff, but, save for a thwarted bank robbery, it’s hardly adventurous. No, Mr Phillips elects to walk London. In the park he chats with a pornographer. He visits the Tate and wonders at the DayGlo tourists. He visits the insipid fleshpots of Soho. Church. Dines with his arrogant, pushy older son in a trendy eatery.

He thinks about sex. And numbers. Most things come down to sex and numbers. How many people on this bus are strangers to anal sex? Mr Phillips read a magazine survey in his den, where he likes to go to masturbate. How often do people masturbate? See a dead body? ‘Sums come to the rescue.’

John Lanchester’s follow-up to the much regarded The Debt to Pleasure is a curious beast – part sojourn, part pilgrimage through an uncertain mind. Mr Phillips has always thought about things. Maybe it’s a fanciful meeting of the Wellesley Crescent Neighbourhood Watch Association, where Mr Cartwright proposes tackling aeroplane noise with a Mujahideen ground-to-air missile. But more likely it’s sex. (‘When you are young sex is It, when you are older death is.’)

But in the end, Mr Phillips’ worries are all reduced to numbers. Safety in the quantifiable. How many women in any given year are prepared to appear naked in print? 17,000, he decides; a town one and a half times the size of St Ives. Probability of not having sex in any given 24 hour period? 96.71223 per cent.

There is the odd quibble. For example, Lanchester’s insistence on referring to Mr Phillips. (It’s Victor, in case you were wondering.) The tramp and schoolgirl who snog ecstatically on a crowded bus are straight out of Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster. But the ferreting attention to minutiae and the steady accretion of sadness raise this funny, poignant book to more than simple affectation. By the end, we know much, but not what he will tell Mrs Phillips when he opens the door. ‘He has no idea what will happen next.’ •

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