Mr Phillips

John Lanchester

John Lanchester is the author who shot to fame with the acclaimed The Debt to Pleasure a couple of years ago. Personally I found that book dense and snobbish and was annoyed by its extravagant recipes. While I can understand that that overall effect was all part of its design and that the narrator's pompous voice was actually being sent up I still found it almost unreadable.

Mr Phillips is almost as different a book as it is possible to imagine. It's written very plainly but with plenty of wit and humour. Its main character is Mr Phillips himself (it's something like half way through the book before we learn his first name) and the 250 odd pages of the book are devoted to a single day in his life. Sacked from his accountancy job the previous Friday he spends the day in question wandering through London.

That he cuts a very quiet, tidy and unassuming figure (the cartoon accountant) and yet is haunted by private obsessions, mostly sexual, is part of the fun. Sexual statistics are his favourite theme. His speciality is to take a voyeuristic tabloid factoid (percentage of the population who claim to have attempted anal sex, for example), analyse its veracity and apply it with actuarial rigour to a nearby population (for example, the passengers sharing the bus he is currently riding on). This is Nicholson Baker territory and well worth the cover price.