Daydream believer

Daydreamers have been with us a long time. Canadian James Thurber's famous short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (from My World and Welcome to It, 1942) introduced an iconic figure in the character of the hen-pecked husband; small wonder that he was immortalised by cinema as early as 1947. More recently, Nicholson Baker's hilarious debut, The Mezzanine (1989) offered a voyeuristic, quasi-Proustian variation on the daydreamer theme which also satirised the consumer society. However, the cuckolded outsider, Leopold Bloom, remains the most enduring daydreamer of them all. Daydreamers, it should be stressed, tend to be less than fulfilled Everyman figures - and are also inclined to spend a great deal of time pondering sex with unattainable females.

Into this gallery of dreamers and voyeurs walks the unlucky, rather than particularly downtrodden, central character of John Lanchester's engaging second novel, Mr Phillips. If the story doesn't sound overly original, Lanchester's tone and meticulously restrained method are bound to impress. Considering it follows his hugely successful and sinisterly clever debut The Debt to Plea- sure, this new book is predictably confident; it is also unforced, ordinary and utterly different to that previous book. Above all, it is witty without being clever.

Having abandoned the cool first person narrative voice of the earlier novel, he has opted for a deadpan third person voice, which is filtered through the imaginings of a podgy 50-year-old, middle-class accountant who appears to be fatalistically satisfied with his lot. The father of two sons, he still loves his wife and while she doesn't feature in his colourful sexual fantasies, which - true to his accounting nature - tend to wander off into statistical speculations, he has never been unfaithful to Mrs Phillips.

Lanchester is sending up life in general, although his Mr Phillips, a Londoner who barely knows his native city, does reside in a typical suburb, complete with busybody neighbour, where Monday begins with the arrival of the dustbin lorry. It is the final movement in a ceremony which begins on Sunday night "with remembering to put out the rubbish - an action which is more complicated than it once was, since the council now recycles waste, and there are different coloured plastic bags and different weekly schedules for paper and plastics and bottles".

As he lies in bed deciding when to officially wake up, he feels "that if he were blindfolded, disorientated, whirled round and round, given mind-altering drugs, deprived of external stimuli and calendars, but was still allowed to keep his mood, he would be able to work out what day of the week it was". Aware of his age and his failing, flabby body, he knows he has reached the stage where he no longer lusts after older women and is instead interested in younger and younger girls. Sagely he concedes, "you went off to work one day thinking about Anne Bancroft in The Graduate and you came back thinking about Jenny Agutter in The Railway Children". Meanwhile his sons are strangers; the younger one remains at home, having turned into a full-time sleeper.

On his way to work, Mr Phillips allows himself a brief interlude at the window of the local travel agent. It's as good a place as any for a fantasy starring the secretary at his office. In his daydream she romps on the beach, but reality takes over in the guise of a "totally solid gridlock, not just slow-moving but fixed" causing the entire city to "gradually and permanently" shut down, "like a dying brain".

While waiting for the train at Clapham, the sight of a fellow commuter perusing the Page Three girls inspires a detailed calculation, which begins with his reckoning "the papers publish say seventy pictures of girls with no clothes on a week"; including magazines, he eventually arrives at the figure of 16,744 as "the number of British women happy to take their clothes off for money per annum". Mr Phillips, being the meticulously relentless accountant he is, then concludes, "Seventeen thousand people would be a town one and half times the size of St Ives, where they took their first holiday after Martin was born. So that's a whole small townful of naked British women among us disguised as normal people."

In addition to providing our hero with an opportunity to calculate the number of naked women appearing in British publications, commuting also presents him with the competing body odours of his fellow travellers. This naturally introduces other topics such as the quality of air in trains. And what about mystery breakdowns? "Mr Phillips's personal record stuck underground is an hour and a half."

Released from the train, the narrative shifts slightly, as the careful Mr Phillips strays off his routine path. Fact is, he has lost the very thing which has defined him throughout his adult life, his job. Dressed as an office worker, he begins to explore a world in which aimless nine to five workers are a rarity.

Throughout the novel, Mr Phillips and the men he meets along the way are preoccupied by sex, its elusiveness, its strangeness, its endorsement of them as human beings. Far less aggressively handled than is usual in current fiction, sex, for Mr Phillips, is about more than power; it is possibly the only reason for his existence. By the time he makes a surprise call on his older son for a quick lunch, he is uncomfortably vulnerable. The lunch does the rest. Lanchester succeeds in making the deadpan Mr Phillips wholly human and sympathetic.

But not all the speculation is about sex. There is a brilliant set-piece examining the behaviour of the drivers of white vans: "the vans tended to belong to self-employed small businessmen, who as a type were noted for being aggressive, impatient, right wing, unashamed about tactics of late payment and intimidation . . . there was something about white vans that made the people who drove them become irrationally aggressive - i.e. white vans made drivers go insane . . . there was something about white vans that made aggressive men want to drive them - i.e., only people who were already insane drove white vans."

Near the close of the novel, Mr Phillips, having been to a blue movie and having also found himself in a bank raid because he had stalked a TV personality there, is on his way home still burdened by his secret. Stopping to assist an old lady with her shopping, he then enters the world of the high-rise flat. She turns out to be the widow of a fanatic who once taught him religion, largely by harping on the subject of sin. As his widow recalls, "He used to say it was the only bit of religion schoolboys had any interest in."

Such is Lanchester's subtle skill, that this highly intelligent comic novel develops into a moving if determinedly unsentimental portrait of an ordinary man - not a hero, not a villain - who, far from losing his way, has his way clinically taken from him.