Dry dreams

>> >>Mr. Phillips is a slice of sexually repressed, existentialist Britannia

by JULIET WATERS

"At night, Mr. Phillips lies beside his wife and dreams about other women," John Lanchester tells us in the first sentence of his second novel, Mr. Phillips. He grades the sex on a scale of one to 10. A one would be a mild dream about an adolescent crush. A seven would be a dream about his boss's secretary responding eagerly to Mr. Phillips's "frightened but keen request to be sodomized with a nine-inch rubber penis." But even in the 10s Victor Phillips never has sex. "Mr. Phillips never gets wet."

In the second chapter we are treated to Mr. Phillips' daydream of a neighbourhood watch meeting dealing with the noise caused by the air traffic at nearby Heathrow airport. It is resolved that his neighbour Mr. Cartwright will network with the Mujhadeen guerrillas of Afghanistan to obtain one of the ground-to-air missiles given to them by the CIA. Once one of the planes has been shot down, the neighbours figure air traffic will slow dramatically. It is not resolved, however, whether they will send a warning first, so that the action will be correctly interpreted as a protest against the noise and "not claimed for their own handiwork by unscrupulous terrorists."

It's a given in literature that a mild-mannered accountant who has a lot of repressed sex and rage fantasies will soon meet with an unfortunate event that will demolish his tightly structured life. My favourite novel in this brand of white collar tragi-comedies is William Boyd's Armadillo, a vivid, black satire about an insurance adjuster who, one day at work, discovers a dead body. There's much about Lanchester to suggest that he might be a burgeoning successor to Boyd. Lanchester's first novel, Debt to Pleasure, was a murder confession in the form of a cookbook. He has the same vintage dry British wit, a wonderful eye for eccentric, surreal London moments, and Mr. Phillips is so rich in pointed, tiny insights that it becomes almost an impressionistic blur.

But unfortunately there is one major difference between the two writers. Boyd is a master at plot. Lanchester doesn't even attempt one.

The only thing that happens has already happened. In chapter 7 we discover that Mr. Phillips is not going to work on the Monday on which the novel takes place, because on Friday Mr. Phillips was laid off, or "made redundant" as the Brits put it. He hasn't had the guts to tell his wife yet, so this day in the life of Mr. Phillips will be spent wandering aimlessly around London in his business suit.

On the up side, we get a charming tour of London by an obsessive, but in many surprising ways, imaginative man. Without self-pity or bitterness Mr. Phillips observes the many redundancies of formerly cool Britannia. He decides to drop in on his son, Martin, who runs a small business that's something of a neo K-tel. Currently he's working on a compilation of hits called Boys On Girls, a collection of politically incorrect tracks about boys "being randy and fancying girls." Martin's reading a book called Hitler Wins! Management Skills of Germany's Greatest Leader (And Don't Let Anybody Tell You Different). After a somewhat disappointing lunch with his faux-bohemian son, Mr. Phillips will spot a TV celebrity coming out of a boutique called Chez Gueverra.

Details like these make Mr. Phillips a rich travelogue of the malaise of contemporary British culture. But on the down side, the novel never really develops much narrative momentum, and the meaninglessness of Mr. Phillips' life begins to wear the reader down. If one rates existential mood pieces in the same way that Mr. Phillips rates his dreams, it probably deserves about a seven. There's a lot of interesting intellectual and artistic wankery going on in this book, but in the end, like Mr. Phillips, it just never gets wet. :

Mr. Phillips by John Lanchester, McClelland & Stewart, hc, 247 pp, $25.99