Max Barry's Company

The SMH's Spectrum reviewed this book the other day, or perhaps it was an article, because there was a review in yesterday's Spectrum, so unless the editor was inhaling a little too much and inadvertently published reviews of the same book twice in a fortnight, the first article must have been an interview of sorts.  It interested me because the book sounded good and focused on Barry's success in America while remaining virtually unheard of in Australia.  Normally there is a ticket parade for any Australian deemed successful overseas, so it seemed quite odd that he is still so unknown.  But then there has been two articles/reviews in a fortnight and I bought the book, so perhaps I just did not allow time in which this celebration is to take hold.  This is Barry’s third book, the other two I’ve yet to read.  It is a parody of corporate culture, which offers meat food for wit to feed on.  He does a particularly nice job with the vacuity of corporate-speak, ‘teamwork’, ‘goal oriented’ and so on. The plot centres on a new graduate recruit, Jones,  to a large corporation, which seems to produce nothing and revolves around departments meeting other departments’ demands rather than those of any external customers.  Unfortunately Jones character never seems to develop that much, there’s vague references to his life outside the office, and to his time before taking up employment at the company, but not enough to really find the book’s claim for his ethical superiority to be that believable.  And so the brief appearances of his sister and former housemates just seem unnecessary rather than illuminating.  The femme fatale of the piece, Eve, is a much more interesting character and offers some interesting thoughts on moral relativity and ethics in the business world, at least being consistent in the ultimate outworking of absolute ambition.   While the plot doesn’t exactly pivot with the precision of a champion-netballer, it is both interesting and funny, and certainly emphasises the soul-destroying hell of corporations determined to make money whatever the cost for staff.  Or appear to be making money so that the share prices goes up and senior management actually make money.  It’d make a very good film script, in the I heart Huckabees/Being John Malkovich vein.  In some ways I think Barry should have written it as a film, a lot of the scenes that take a few pages to cover in the book could have been achieved visually in 20 seconds and would have meant that there weren’t quite so many characters clunking about the plot.  This all sounds overly negative though, the book is worth reading, and the thing that makes the book worth a read is the writing, Barry has a nice turn of biting parody that makes for an entertaining afternoon.