Mr Phillips by John Lanchester

Author:John Lanchester [Lanchester, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780571268085
Publisher: Faber
Published: 2012-02-01T21:00:00+00:00

first 5 years 6 hrs 37.5% of waking time

next 12 years 1 hr 6.25%

next 3 years 4 hrs 25%

next 5 years 1 hr 6.25%

next 14 years 15 min at home + 1.45 hrs at work = 2 hrs = 12.5%

next 11 years 4 hrs 25%

This works out as a weighted average of 16.375 per cent, or 2.62 hours, or 2 hours and 37 minutes of, broadly speaking, free or nothing time. It is a lot of blank space to account for in one life span. Now that he is redundant he is going to have even more of it; in fact, he can have all day every day, unless and until he finds something else to do. The thought of this is an immense strain. It must be why so many men died after their retirement.

Two of the many foreign coach drivers parked across the road from the Tate are having an argument in a language Mr Phillips does not recognize. They are standing on the road-ward side of their huge two-decker vehicles. The shorter and by a fine margin angrier of the two is pointing repeatedly at the other’s coach, then at himself, then downwards at the road, while the other man energetically shakes his head and keeps loudly repeating the same word.

Mr Phillips presses on up the road, past the nasty modern building where the Labour Party has its headquarters, into which a dispatch rider has just stridden, past the dwarfing, monolithic government buildings along the Embankment. Further along the road he can see the beginnings of Westminster, all grand and Gothic and trying to look a million years old. If banks try to look all secure and posh and safe and stable and big and respectable and stuffy and built to last for all time, for the simple reason that at heart they are just casinos, what is it that these government buildings were concealing? Probably that they tried to make people feel small, so that the actions of the people in these buildings will seem far beyond their understanding, impersonal and authoritative and independent of anything so trivial as the consent of the governed. It is like Peter Pan only backwards: if we all clapped our hands then the whole edifice of government could be made to go away, to fade like night terrors remembered in sunshine.

As Mr Phillips nears the Houses of Parliament he sees a nice little park across the road. For a moment he wonders if this is where politicians are always being interviewed for the telly, then he realizes it isn’t.

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