Product Description

Mr Phillips is an accountant who lies in bed with his wife and dreams of other women. When he loses his job and tells no one, his first day out of work takes in a false journey to the office, a stroll with a pornographer in Battersea Park, a blue film, and a bank robbery in Knightsbridge.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #73206 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Fiftysomething Victor Phillips is a senior-ish accountant with respected City firm Wilkins & Co. Or rather, he was: unbeknown to his sons, his saintly wife and his nosy suburban neighbours, Mr Phillips has lost his job, and doesn't know what to do next. So what he does do is the most sadly predictable: pretend he's still in work. On the morning of the day's events that comprise the entirety of this novel he rises as per, breakfasts as per and steps out into the city, as per. From then on, though, he embarks on a bizarre odyssey around London, doing various sad, strange or aimless things: if he's not ogling schoolgirls on buses, he's being accosted by nutters in the Tate or trying to meet TV celebs during a bank robbery.

Taken as read, the whole might sound odd: a Diary of a Next To Nobody. What saves from the book from being weirdly boring is Lanchester's skill in capturing Mr Phillips' inner voice: as the ex-accountant schleps around town he is constantly working out, for instance, how many women take their clothes off for money, or how much more likely it is one will die on any given week than win the National Lottery (about 3,000 times more likely). All this is very witty and very well done--and very much the meat of the book. If the novel is ultimately aimless, that is, of course, the point. John Lanchester has taken an average day in an averagely tragic life and made from it, if not great art, a readable, amusing and perceptive novel. --Sean Thomas

Amazon.co.uk Review
Fiftysomething Victor Phillips is a senior-ish accountant with respected City firm Wilkins & Co. Or rather, he was: unbeknown to his sons, his saintly wife and his nosy suburban neighbours, Mr Phillips has lost his job, and doesn't know what to do next. So what he does do is the most sadly predictable: pretend he's still in work. On the morning of the day's events that comprise the entirety of this novel he rises as per, breakfasts as per and steps out into the city, as per. From then on, though, he embarks on a bizarre odyssey around London, doing various sad, strange or aimless things: if he's not ogling schoolgirls on buses, he's being accosted by nutters in the Tate or trying to meet TV celebs during a bank robbery.

Taken as read, the whole might sound odd: a Diary of a Next To Nobody. What saves from the book from being weirdly boring is Lanchester's skill in capturing Mr Phillip's inner voice: as the ex-accountant schleps around town he is constantly working out, for instance, how many in women take their clothes off for money, or how much more likely it is one will die on any given week than win the National Lottery (about 3,000 times more likely). All this is very witty and very well done--and very much the meat of the book. If the novel is ultimately aimless, that is, of course, the point. John Lanchester has taken an average day in an averagely tragic life and made from it, if not great art, a readable, amusing and perceptive novel.--Sean Thomas

Review
A brief account of a day in the life of a man who has been an accountant for all his working life. Mr Phillips struggles into wakefulness, and wonders about the cost of post-it notes, his chances of winning the lottery and of the number of times he has masturbated and made love. Then, as he has done every day of his working life, he sets off for the office. This isn't as prurient as it sounds. Mr Phillips is an accountant, paid to make detailed calculations about actuarial chance. Quite early on, the reader begins to suspect such concerns have destroyed any chance he might ever have had of living his own life. What happens? Well, Mr Phillips sets off for work, muses on traffic, nose-picking and (rather improbably) gets involved in a bank raid. Then, at almost the usual time, he returns home to find his youngest child washing the car. Another day in the working life of an ordinary man. Except this isn't like any other day in his working life. Like many white middle-aged men over 50, Mr Phillips is suffering an identity crisis because he has been made redundant from the job where he earned a miserable salary for as long as anyone can remember. He's not, however, a parody figure along the lines of David Nobbs's wonderful Reggie Perrin. Nor is he (quite) an Everyman of the kind conjured up by Isherwood in his marvellous late novel A Singular Man. The intense detail with which Mr. P's day is described recalls most vividly the Nicholson Baker of The Mezzanine, his best book. We are in the country of fashionable minimalism. This is a fictional landscape from which all colour, passion and emotion have been deliberately bled in order to impart an air of universality. But if that sounds negative it is not meant to: this book is extraordinarily likeable. Perhaps because, underneath the fashionable packaging, there is a sense of an author who cares about people wildly different from himself. Mr. Phillips's son in particular is superb: a go-ahead twenty-something who repackages old pop hits and tries to make time for his old man but whose brusque sweetness only serves to emphasize the loneliness and isolation of a hero judged to be past his sell-by date. Some of the the best things about this book are the things that work directly against its artistic method - its concern for ordinary people, its quiet humanity and its attempt to put the marginalized, for once, at the centre of an almost-story. (Kirkus UK)

Customer Reviews

Surprisingly sensitive but didn't really grab me
I liked Mr Phillips. He was struggling to cope with the strange situations that he found himself in during the day and could only manage by reverting back to his comfort zone - numbers!! He counts everything and seems to be able to even describe situations using statistics, and nothing more in some cases. Making him an accountant does feel a bit cliched but was an easy way to introduce his feelings of ease with numbers.
The attention to detail is very interesting and the precision of the descriptions is very powerful. So much so that I could really imagine myself thinking his thoughts.
Along with the narrative of the day is a bearly veiled panic about his future, which seems to ease as his experiences go from bizarre to down right scarey.
Having said all that, I can't say that I really enjoyed the book and thought that the emphasis on his sexual thoughts and the description of the film he sees was really unnecessary (and I don't think that I am a prude in any way).

More of a nudge in the ribs than a poke in the eye
An original, gently amusing and interesting take on the day-in-a-life genre, as a reluctantly redundant accountant attempts to come to terms with the reality of a world from which he has largely been shielded.

Lanchester has an impressively acute eye for detail and for the niceties of social norms; published in 2000, this book is prescient in its anticipation of the hegemony of the mobile telephone, to great comic effect. He makes much of the veneer of our lives and of the depths of depravity and fun whch lie beneath it, and there are a number of memorable one-liners as Mr. Phillips continues along his voyage of (self-) discovery.

While the book does seem to lose a little momentum towards the end, I suspect that is more an indication of the constraints of the structure than of any great failing on the author's part. Very enjoyable stuff.

Mr Phillips
One gets the impression that John Lanchester wasn't exactly straining at the leash here.Lanchester is a hyper talent, (if you've read his other stuff you'll know that) But this book is very modest in scope.The plot and characters are so underdone and tightly clipped that one is left feeling a bit cold by the end - Mr Phillips is simple man with simple tastes and habits,(his desire to get his end away leads acts is a constant theme) -theres nothing inherently wrong with that, provided he is being used as a metaphor for grander things. If this was meant to be a subtle muse on the vacuity of nine to five or the creeping paralysis of careers and getting old, or aspects of contemporary urban existence then fine but its just that its so subtle that you're wondering whether the author, or yourself is missing something. It almost reads like a short storey. I was felt a little frustrated by Mr Phillips,I would have prefererd it if there were a few more layers to him, beacuse if nothing else -he was impossble to escape from! He could still have been a mundane, pedantic loser and been a bit more complex. In underdevloping Mr Phillips he constricts the movement of so much else. (I guess this might have been Lanchester's intention, if so holding back like this gives it an overwelmingly icey feel)It's interesting to read some readers found it funny, there were attempts at humour by I personally didn't. Maybe it was the lack of humanity and warmth of Mr Phillips which made me unable to laugh. I did though feel drawn to the background narrative - Lanchester's writing, as usual, is absorbing, infact its more than that, its a bloody joy! This is what saves it, and ultimtately why when I was asked to give it marks out of five I couldn't give it 2 so I gave it 3. Possibly I'm being a little harsh because I enjoyed his first novel so much, there is after all so much rubbish around, and this certainly isn't that. If you were to judge the narrative in journalistic terms,(he's written some great stuff for the guardian and other publications)and in the weight of the writing then I'd have to give it 5/5. Im afraid it justn't really cohere as a particulary good novel.