Mr Phillips

by John Lanchester

Mr. Phillips, c'est vous, c'est moi, l'homme de la rue, le " petit homme " de Gogol, que rien ne distingue de ses voisins - ni ses préjugés, ni ses tabous, ni ses phobies, ni ses fantasmes - et qui voit soudain le ciel lui tomber sur la tête le jour où l'entreprise qu'il a diligemment servie pendant plusieurs décennies le licencie sans cérémonie. Ce Monsieur-Tout-le-Monde, à la cinquantaine bedonnante, va mettre à profit sa première journée d'oisiveté forcée pour s'offrir une promenade dans le Londres d'aujourd'hui et découvrir sa ville, ses congénères, leurs richesses, leurs faiblesses ou leurs bizarreries. La banalité tout apparente de ce périple londonien est subvertie tout au long par l'humour caustique de Lanchester, qui fait la part belle à ces " excentriques " dont la littérature anglaise a le secret. Témoin, par exemple, les trajets en métro aux heures de pointe, la visite guidée de la Tate Gallery et la découverte de la peinture préraphaélite par ce Candide au regard décapant, ou la prise d'otages lors de l'attaque d'une banque. S'il touche à certaines questions fondamentales sur l'existence : le travail, la place de l'individu tant dans la société que dans la famille, l'amour, le vieillissement, la mort, ce portrait intelligent et spirituel a essentiellement pour but de fournir au lecteur un miroir où se regarder vivre au quotidien.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literary Fiction, British Literature, London, Contemporary, Modern

268 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

John Lanchester is the author of four novels and three books of non-fiction. He was born in Germany and moved to Hong Kong. He studied in UK. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and was awarded the 2008 E.M. Forster Award. He lives in London.

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dr. Rayner

Dr. Rayner has just finished reading Mr. Phillips, a novel he greatly enjoyed, and now he walks to work along his usual route thinking about the review he is planning to write. Dr. Rayner has recently learned, from an online friend he feels he knows quite well but has never met in person, that he may be a High Energy Introvert or HEI. HEIs spend a large part of their time having entertaining conversations with themselves, since they tend to find the company of other people enervating. Dr. Rayner thinks that Mr. Phillips, who must be about the same age as himself, is probably also an HEI.

The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for Goodreads policy reasons)

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 4 out of 5]

He's de Man (If Not for a Weil, Then for a Day)

Work turns many of us into creatures of habit. We design and follow routines, then return home each day, only to begin a new one, either that evening or the following morning.

Mr. Phillips is made redundant from his accounting job at the age of 50, only the next business day he appears to set off to work in the normal manner, not having told Mrs. Phillips.

Jettisoned from the self-contained universe that was his job, suddenly he has no rights, but equally he has no obligations.

Shorn of purpose, his commute into London by various types of public transport takes the shape of a modest Joycean odyssey, a pin-striped, but otherwise picaresque, adventure. He confronts desire, fantasy, sex, procreation, recreation, art, crime, punishment, life and death in apparently random, but comic, fashion.

By the time he returns home, he has no idea what will happen next. There is no longer an established routine. Only he doesn't seem overly concerned. Now, finally, he is free. He might even be ready to confront the truth and tell Mrs. Phillips. Tomorrow promises to be another day, another adventure, another odyssey.

Lanchester constructs his existentialist tale both deftly and wittily, his anti-hero not a stranger, but a neighbour, if not perhaps someone from this side of the fence.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

As you know, Mr Phillips, a portly middle aged accountant, the quintessence of dullness, has been made redundant the previous Friday but hasn't got the nerve up to tell his family, and this is now Monday, so he toddles off as if going to work as usual, and spends the whole day pootling around in London and thinking stuff. That's it. That's all of it.

Mr Phillips is the new Leopold Bloom for sure. The cast of his thoughts, the somewhat curious musings on this and that, are exactly like our Leopold but they're spelled out in complete sentences instead of the staccato stream of conciousness Joyce does. And like Poldy, Mr Phillips is an all-round decent bloke who thinks wistfully about sex at times.

E.g. he muses about the number of topless and nude models there must be to supply the magazines and newspapers (note for non British readers : there are national "newspapers" such as the Sport and the Daily Star which publish nude photographs of girls every day – this might be a thing peculiar to Britain, I'm not sure) :

So assume, again super-conservatively, at least twenty-five magazines coming out every week, with say ten girls per issue each, which is 25 x 10 = 250 naked girls per week times 52 is 50 times 250 is 12500 plus 2 times 250 is 500 = 13000. When you add the newspaper figure this gives a very very conservative estimate of 3744 plus 13000 = 16744, which is the number of British women happy to take their clothes off for money per annum. … 17000 people would be a town one and a half times the size of St Ives where they took their first holiday after Martin was born

I think Mr P doesn't take into account the probable non-Britishness of some of these models, but more pertinently, the likelihood that a number of them will surely do multiple sessions for the various mags, so the numbers are probably overstated. But anyway, we take his comical point. The novel is set in 1995, before the internet got going properly - imagine his frantic calculations now!
And there are various comments on non-sexual matters which are quite nice, such as

We wouldn't care so much what people thought of us if we knew how seldom they did

(which I'd be glad if it was true but am not sure it is) but really, this novel is a rather thin margherita pizza you know. There's absolutely no pepperoni, anchovies, ground beef, mushrooms, or olives. Not even any Parmesan cheese. Pootling around, going to London places, thinking slightly dull, slightly melancholic thoughts. If his brain was on the radio you'd be flipping the dial.

I may point out that none other than Germaine Greer thinks it's a masterpiece (blurb on the front) and none other than Zadie Smith wishes she'd written it (blurb on the front) and the mighty London Review of Books says

Exceptionally funny and often astoundingly intelligent… a contemporary Tristram Shandy

And mere I can only flap my mouth and say a) no, it's not; b) no, it's not; and c) no, it's really really not.

Two and a half stars.

[notgettingenough · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delight.

----------------------

Added after reading Manny's review of this book and having but one vote for my own...

NGE sits despondently on park bench, thinking:

If each two words of a review get one vote, then Manny is going to get 346.5 votes.

And let's face it, he only gave me that one so that I'd go and look at his.

Fuck.

---------------

I can't help adding something to this review, since I do think in Mr Phillips ways from time to time. Have you ever thought about how much time women spend putting on makeup? Well, if you spent an hour a day (this includes putting it on and off) for 50 years - in fact most women would spend many more years than that, since they start as children and stick to it until death - but say one hour a day, fifty years, that is TWO YEARS of your life you have spent doing nothing but putting shit on your face!!!!

Is that not the most amazing statistic?

I do sometimes imagine the things I will regret on my deathbed. I would be so, so bitter to have realised as I lay thinking about all the things I hadn't had time for, that I had spent two precious years poisoning my skin and spending lots of money on it.

What a fucking idiotic thing to do. Makeup.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mr Phillips is a 50-year old accountant for a small catering firm, living in outer London with two sons (the younger a non-communicative older teenager, the older running a Soho based CD compilation firm). The book is based on a single Monday after a Friday when he has been made redundant (a fact he has not told anyone) and in his work clothes wanders around a muggy London (a park, a museum, a restaurant with his older son, a sex shop/cinema before getting caught in a bank raid) musing on life.

The book is an interesting contrast/comparison to The Debt to Pleasure: the narrative style is much sparser and simple, with a mixture of Reginald Perrin absurdity and sexual fantasies of someone ostensibly dull and straight, Magnus Mills style description of mundane working (albeit white collar in this case) and “Curious Incident …” retreats by the narrator to a enumerating/accounting understanding of the world when it threatens to overwhelm him; the narrator is fundamentally good rather than psychopathic, nervous/bewildered rather than arrogant, only too self-aware rather than deluded, voyeuristic rather than participative in sexual activity.

Overall this is an easier and slightly less satisfying read. It could be re-read but only after a delay and simply as an easy to read entertaining tale and not as would be the case with a “Debt to Pleasure” re-read immediately to go back over images/ideas missed in the deluge of them first time around.

Finally like “Debt to Pleasure” this book, while short, is too long to sustain its single idea/conceit and would be better as a shorter novella or perhaps even interweaved with the former book David Mitchell style in a multi-narrator book.

[John Read · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was a requested present after reading excellent reviews. Most saying how hilarious the book was. (I didn't titter once.) If it hadn't been for the fact that someone else had spent money on it I would not have persevered. Also I have a rule - no matter how bad a book may be I should at least read the first 50 pages just to give it a chance. Boy was that a struggle. Especially as I have a thing about foul language. I despise it and if a book contains it then there should be a warning on the cover rather like film ratings. Isn't that only fair & proper ?
This book is full of foul language. By page 12 we have the C word. Not just in passing but in the most crass terminolgy. Page 18 gives us spermicide and lower body smells. Page 19 gives us a discussion on masterbation - not in such 'polite' terms - and tedious discussions on how many times people have sex. By page 22 we are discussing erections. Later on we have: The variety of sewer contents; Descriptions of anus & vulva. And so it goes on. A large part of the beginning of the book is taken up with penis size. 14 year old schoolboy stuff. Only when the titular character gets out of the house and goes walkabout for the day around London does the book become moderately interesting. There are some sharp social observations that make you smile or nod knowingly and some mildly interesting situations such as when Mr Phillips is caught in a bank robbery. But they are all anti-climactic. And the obsession the character has with mathematical lists becomes tedious. From the number of times people have sex to several pages given over to the odds on winning the lottery. They become like one of those meaningless tabloid surveys on some pointless subject dreamed up by a PR agency. The ending lives up (down) to the pattern of the book. Totally unsatisfying, anti climax even lazy.
Would I read another book by John Lanchester ? Not a chance. There are millions of books and writers out there who are much more worthy of a readers time and money.

I normally include the book cover reviews at the end of my own review. But in my opinion the glowing accolades are so misleading I can't bring myself to include them

[David Lentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel falls under the currently popular theme of a day in an ordinary life. The danger of such a theme is that, even if it is well told, it will essentially represent an ordinary novel. Mr Phillips is an ordinary man who has been made redundant in his accounting job but hasn't the heart to tell his family he's been fired. So he pretends to go to work and wanders the streets of London until he determines how best to handle his professional demise. He is a rotund man in his fifties who wonders what lies ahead for him in the balance of his life. His mind is distracted by illusions and visions as he struggles to overcome the ordinary travails of working in a big city. We really get inside the head of Mr Phillips as we learn his sensual fantasies and proclivities. Other readers seem to have found his preoccupation with this subject rather too graphic; however, we must peel away the inedible leaves of the artichoke to get to the edible heart. Mr Phillips succeeds because this novel shows us the fullness and heart of a 20th century Everyman. We can identify with him in his struggle because Mr Phillips is many of us. Although many novels about ordinary life, like Joyce's Ulysses or Lowry's Under the Volcano, use stylistic innovation, even with the straight-ahead narrative technique of Lanchester, the novel vividly depicts one man's struggle to make sense of his life. There are some great gems in this novel: the writing is tight, densely packed and immensely readable. I look forward to the subsequent work of Mr. Lanchester -- I think he's onto something true and powerful and real in the scope of his work. I recommend Mr Phillips to you: it's only a little shy of great.

[Simon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ecstatic quotes from respectable sources on the cover lead me to expect something special from this one (although I picked it up for free in a hotel library so I can't complain about wasting my money).
What I got was a collection of tired clichés about a white collar worker who spends one day walking on the wild side. He's an accountant (of course) which means that he's mild-mannered, sexually frustrated and spends all his time making calculations in his head. That's about it as far as characterisation is concerned.
Having been made redundant on the Friday, he heads into town on the Monday and tries to think of things to do. He goes to watch a porn film (which he finds mechanical and unerotic - how original...), he follows a minor celebrity down the street, and does various other desperately uninteresting things. And then at the end it just stops. No climax, no resolution, no punchline. A couple of amusing scenes near the start break the tedium, admittedly.
Imagine a cross between Diary of a Nobody, Falling Down and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, but with less wit, insight or excitement.

[Diana · Rating 5 out of 5]

All John Lanchester's books I've read so far have been beautifully and crisply written, and this was no exception. He captures the random thought processes we all experience with perfect precision. Highly recommended like the rest of his books.

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was an okay book wasnt one which really graped me though

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr Phillips is a fifty-something accountant employed by a catering supply company, so why is he not at work on this hot Monday in July? After all, he leaves his house in South London suitably attired at the usual time - even though he has no intention of being at his desk at nine fifteen like every other weekday morning.

From a conversation with a publisher of pornographic magazines in Battersea Park, to a lunch date with his son Martin, to becoming involved in an attempted robbery in a Barclays Bank branch, this essentially decent Everyman moves through his day observing with a keen eye the people and the bustle around him - all the while taking stock of his situation and trying to make sense of the good and bad things that happen to people on their way through life.

Very entertaining are the subtly humorous passages in which the protagonist's accounting mind provides unexpected calculations on matters as diverse as national averages concerning matters sexual and determining how much time is spent on doing nothing in the course of a given life.

This novel is beautifully written with profound insight into the joys and foibles of the human condition.

Author John Lanchester has my undying gratitude for allowing me to accompany the eponymous Mr Phillips on his weekday ramble around London.

[Edmole · Rating 5 out of 5]

A man waking from a dream and then drifting around in many more. The dream of identity at the end of last Century, of the end of stability, of the secret inner life that goes unspoken.

This was a great book, slight and easy but with depth and insight, and real empathy for a real person. It had the real sense of someone's inner life, and especially the sexual focus and appetites of men, where the constant flowing currents of desire and evaluation and fantasy sit alongside all the other streams of our life and often flood through them. Not because we're monsters, we're just full of natural hungers. The second book in a row that I've read that sat at the cusp of the hyper-digital world, now completely changed, and a relief to be in the simpler space of a world where everything isn't immediately available and the dye of events takes time to soak into the fabric of living.

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite enjoyed following our Mr. Phillips on his unplanned adventures across London. Rather than tell his wife he has lost his job Mr. Phillips leaves in the morning as if it is just going to be another boring day...

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pint costs 2.15 in this book.

[Isaac · Rating 4 out of 5]

lost me a bit in the middle but redeemed itself at the end, on the whole not bad but just far too much sexy talk about young girls

[Cathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. Phillips has promised his family they'll go on a holiday in Florida. He's gone to work, every day, year in, year out. And on the day after he's made redundant, Mr. Phillips starts his morning, the same as every morning, puts on his suit and tie, and walks out the door, as if he's going to work. The sound track for this book should have included "Eleanor Rigby." Beautifully written book.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

highly enjoyable, excellently written

[Norma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not really worth the trouble, unless you want to know the inner workings of a not very interesting middle-class man who is obsessed with sex all the time.

[Story · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhat dated but still funny and often compelling. 3.5 stars.

[Travis De Jong · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I could put into words why I enjoyed this book but I can't so I'm sorry. I will provide you with the warning that Mr. Phillips is extremely horny in a very crude way so just reader be warned. And no I don't just like it because of that.

[Martin Castle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. I loved Capital by the same author and this book was even better. The narrative is superb funny and warming with so much attention to detail, brilliant. Sad now I’ve finished it!

[April Andruszko · Rating 1 out of 5]

Were some good lines but was not for me. Found I didn't want to pick it up so abandoned about a third of the way through

[T E · Rating 5 out of 5]

yeah man entertaining enough, kinda like a modern stoner but way funnier, a bit less miserable and only over one day. so not really

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr Phillips is a very ordinary man. An accountant, a London Commuter, a daydreamer about sex, he wakes up on Monday morning and readies himself for the office as he does every day. Except there is a difference today, as he was made redundant on Friday, and hasn't yet brought himself to tell his wife or family.

Over the course of the day, he meets his son for lunch, he chats with a pornographer, he sees a minor celebrity and gets involved in a bank robbery, reflecting all the time with his interior voice on the nature of his former job, his family, the memory or prospect of sex, or whether the probability of death between purchase and draw of a lottery ticket outweighs the probability of winning the jackpot.

Meanwhile, his life as an office-working, commuting wage-drone is dissected sliver by sliver, and is immediately recognisable to all who trudge up to London each day. "Like most experienced commuters, Mr Phillips has a variety of techniques for seizing somewhere to sit, sneaking around the side of the door and sliding into the jump-seats or barrelling down to the far end of the compartment, through the thickets of passengers, briefcases, newspapers, outstretched legs...The battle for a space prepared you for, was an allegory of the daily struggle. You could argue that those who fought their way to the seats were the people who needed them least. To them that hath shall be given, that was the deal." It is this juxtaposition of the quotidian with the interiorised faux philosophy which makes this book so funny and identifiable.

Mr Phillips is vaguely lustfully following D-list celebrity Clarissa Colingford into a bank, when crash-helmetted shotgun-wielding robbers burst in. As Mr Phillips lies on the floor he reminisces on his previous near-death experiences, mortality rates of lottery-ticket buyers and speculates of the reaction of his family to his death. And then he stands up.

Later, he helps an old lady with her shopping. It turns out that she is the wife of Mr Erith (as the rhyme goes, there are men in the village of Erith that nobody seeth or heareth), his fanatical old RE teacher. She shows Mr Phillips a book where several sayings, including one by Paul de Man, are embroidered. "Nothing, whether deed, word thought or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows or exists elsewhere, but only is a random act whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence." Has Mr Phillips' day been the confirmation or refutation of this and the other observations? Or is Lanchester subtly saying, pace de Man, that as a work of literature "Mr Phillips" means nothing, due to the irrelevance of human matters.

So is it trivial or profound? What is sure is that it is very readable, funny and full of blasts of recognition that this fortysomething office-worker found uncomfortably familiar.

Taken from my blog http://roderick-random.blogspot.co.uk...

[Pippa · Rating 4 out of 5]

"When you are young sex is It, when you are older death is."

So, this book literally begins with a well-written, in-depth, multi-part, mathematical study of the main character's sex life. It essentially starts out as an accountant's guide to sex in Britain. There's your litmus test for whether or not this book's for you. I suppose that makes it slightly concerning that I ended up liking this book.

"The closest to a sure thing in Mr. Phillips's sex life is the fact they almost always have sex ... after going to see a film. ... But they only went three or four times a year. Videos didn't have the same effect. For a moment, Mr. Phillips wonders what happened when people became film critics. Perhaps they were the people who bumped up the averages."

You do need to find the accountant's frank, and often creepy, meditations on sex bearable, because the book is littered with them. This also isn't a roaring laughfest: at the root, this is a book about loss.

If you stick around, this is a Londoner's mad and melancholy adventure through central London -- from the tourist traps to, of course, the sex shops. Following Mr. Phillips as he jolts back and forth between total comfort and complete lack thereof with his own city and the people in it is intriguing.

"After a certain time of night the Tube seemed to be populated entirely by the mad, the drunk, and the frightened."

The main character isn't particularly likeable -- an early chapter features a fantasy of his in which he's cheating on his wife while reading the Daily Mail -- but he's interesting to follow, especially with his unfortunate (and often poor judgment-led) habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's easy to get caught up in his realistic, cringeworthy behaviour and the amusing trails along which his mind meanders. Lanchester plays with our inherent voyeurism, something he addresses early on through Mr. Phillips's thoughts about films.

Mr. Phillips is a witty book by a longtime Londoner about an entirely un-witty lifetime Londoner. If you like bittersweetly funny books and London, you'll enjoy this -- though you will likely find the book's fixation on sex, both regular and pornographic, a bit much. If you ever worry about what a man in your life's true thoughts on sex (and women) may be, steer clear.

"Humour is a help in almost any walk of life."

[Gary Twynam · Rating 5 out of 5]

When this book first came out I was in a book club of old university chums. We met once a month in a terrible pub in Covent Garden and talked football, and old times, and bollocks, and occasionally mentioned the book we were supposed to have read. Mr Phillips split opinion. I recommended it and loved it. My gang of successful forty something bankers and similar, not so much. After waxing lyrical to a stubborn audience for several minutes, my best mate, at that time at the crest of his career, said "but it isn't real is it. I can get another job any time." Everyone nodded. I said, "I don't think you get it" and we moved onto the safer ground of taking the piss out of Spurs.

That friend sadly lost his high-powered job soon after and spent several years in the wilderness, before finding greater happiness in a lesser role. He gets it now. The last ten years have only brought into greater clarity how simple economics (and numbers) define our lives and self-regard. How most of us deny this remains one of the great mysteries of my life.

Mr Phillips' dawning realisation that, (roughly) 'me, without my routine and place and security, me, you think I'm the nutter', is very well done indeed, and seems more so with each passing year.

[Juan Pinilla · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel, also about contemporarish life in London, as other works by Lanchester, is focused on the mediocre individual life of an office worker, his secret and public desires, his everyday needs and his limited capacity to cope with a life that could be bigger and richer than it actually is. With his own jokes and curious visions of life, Mr Phillips moves around London and gives us a different view of a city, that of the citizen without extraordinary hopes or interesting stories to tell, but all the same pleasant and understandable. Quite Good.

[Lynn B · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second novel by John Lanchester which I have read. I read Capital earlier this year and thought it was a wonderful state of the nation book set in London. This book is not nearly so weighty a book in any sense of the word. It is a humorous journey through one day in a man's life. It is a very fast read and I enjoyed it very much.

[Doreen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Perhaps unfairly I am giving up on this - the first few chapters' obsession with Mr Phillips'penis has put me right off..though there was a hilarious chapter on the Neighbourhood Watch meeting it isn't enough to keep me listening.

[Ian Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a Guardian Book Club book in September 2006.[return]http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio...