Book Review: Company by Max Barry
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Max Barry is the king of satire and this is another in a long string of his books that deserves high praise. But the problem with satire these days is the world is so ridiculous that satire now resembles the horrible reality. So anyone who has ever had a job will read the first half of this book and recognise the hell that is being an employee.
Jones is fresh out of university with a business degree and it’s the first day of his first job as an assistant to a sales rep at a company called Zephyr. His division is Training Sales and they sell training modules. They don’t deliver the training – that’s done by the Training Delivery division – and their only customers are other divisions within Zephyr.
He wants to know what the company actually does but nobody in Training Sales or any of the other employees he comes across seem to know. They don’t really care either. They might have cared when they first started but now they just do their jobs and don’t ask too many questions. They’ve mostly had the will to live beaten out of them. And if they haven’t, they’ve become the ones beating the will to live out of others – aka management.
Every manager at Zephyr has a book about the Omega Management System – a thinly veiled version of Six Sigma – on their desk, which Jones thinks might be the key to success within the company and he’s absolutely right but not in the way he imagines.
After one too many times being fobbed off, Jones decides to go directly to the CEO for some straight answers. But no one has ever met the CEO and his office is in the penthouse suite at the top of the building, unable to be accessed without the right security clearance pass for the elevator. He climbs the stairs all the way and when he finds the door at the top locked, he kicks it open. What he is confronted with sets up an ethical dilemma he never saw coming. Still, he’s lucky. Even though what he finds is sickening, it’s the best possible reason for why Zephyr treats their staff so badly. A reason that no company in the real world can fall back on.
I read the first half of this book with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach because so many of the situations and people Barry writes about here as fiction are situations and people I experienced in my previous corporate career in the real world. For someone who has never been through it, it probably seems ridiculous and over the top. For those of us who have, it’s unbelievable that we ever allowed ourselves to be sucked into the vortex. For those still stuck inside, get out now because it doesn’t get any better! (There’s a stolen donut storyline that ends up getting someone fired in the first few chapters and continues to be brought up until almost the very last chapter and if it weren’t for the fact that we’ve all heard about similar things in our real jobs, we’d shake our heads at the imbecility of it.)
The author worked at Hewlett Packard “conducting secret research for this book”, according to the author bio (no doubt his pre-writing career that he never imagined would be the basis for a fascinating story) and the dedication is to HP (no doubt as a form of apology to them for exposing all their secrets – not the intellectual property secrets, just the things that their HR department would probably prefer potential employees didn’t know).
Once the big reveal comes about half way through, the book descends into farce but a very enjoyable farce. As with all Max Barry books, there’s no happy ending – the worlds in which he sets his books are too far gone for happy endings. It actually gets the ending that Jones was threatened with when he found out the big secret and told he couldn’t tell anyone else. Jones eventually does tell everybody else and nobody’s happy, not the company or the employees. But nobody was happy before so it seems almost fitting. At least, in the end, they know the truth.
In my review of another Max Barry book, Jennifer Government, I wrote, “It’s a frightening and extreme version of a place the world is approaching. Money is the end goal and there are no limits to the measures to which people will go to get it… It’s a cautionary tale for us today.” It’s just as relevant for Company.
Read this book and the veil of ignorance will be lifted, if you haven’t already figured it out, to expose the horrors of the work hierarchy. It doesn’t have to be this way. But currently, more than ever, it is.
In a word: chilling.
4 stars
*First published on Goodreads 13 December 2019
