Company - Max Barry

As a former employee of Hewlett Packard, Company is another of Max Barry's early books dealing satirically (ie. wholly realistically) with the absurdity of business corporate interests and trivial office politics (or perhaps trivial business interests and absurd office politics). I was going to say that he has moved on from that, but if you look deeper even into his SF adventure Providence, you can see that the office and corporate experience is still there, so it goes deep.

In Company however it's completely - and I mean completely - immersed in the world of business. We get full-on corporate speak, mission statements and productivity targets for Zephyr Holdings, a company that delivers training packages. Its business objective however is not as you might expect to increase productivity and sales, but to make the business look lean and competitive in the financial market for its shareholders - or at least that's how it appears. Hence one of the four sales reps in Zephyr is fired for being too successful and earning more commission than the company can afford. 

It's far more important for a company to look like it is serious, and that means further cuts are necessary. Efficiencies and savings will be made, or appear to be made, by firing the in-house catering and buying in catering services, which turns out to be from mostly the same staff. Somehow however a new trainee assistant rep has been employed while there is a freeze on recruitment in the middle of a company restructure. Stephen Jones, it transpires, has been hired under the stationery budget along with some paperclips and finds himself taking on the vacant post, even though he isn't quite sure what the company actually does and no one else seems to want to know. They seem to have far more important matters to consider such as a missing donut.

As the new employee in the team, or new chimp as the others describe his status, Jones has what the other members of the team consider some unusual ideas. Apparently he isn't happy with the glossy brochure description of Zephyr as a "vertically integrated distribution chain" of "diversified product offering". Worst of all, he has the absurd idea of planning to go and speak directly to Senior Management about it. Well, it turns out that there is departmental managers, senior managers and then Alpha managers, and the latter are the ones really calling the shots, but no-one knows who they are and indeed are not even aware of their existence.

Which all sounds a bit conspiracy-like and I suppose that is the inevitable next stage of Max Barry's plundering of the world of corporate business being to little more than to look after corporate interests. It's certainly more important than just making money. Barry's previous book, Jennifer Government was a somewhat sinister look at corporate power and sponsorship that even now is becoming more a reality, but while Company initially appears to be a satire on The Office side of observational comedy around the corporate world with its buzzwords, key objectives and managerial speak euphemisms. There's a kind of Magnus Mills surrealism reductio as absurdum to the direction here: and believe me, the world Barry describes goes have far to reductio. Most of that is just in the first 50 pages, but can the author stretch this out to novel length?

Of course he can. It does require a little stretching of credibility to set up a conspiracy theory about the true nature of Zephyr Holdings, but in a way it only serves to underline the satire that is not just close to reality, in some ways it actually reveals elements of reality, the madness and self-serving nature of corporate business, finance and capitalism that remain unspoken. It's the mentality that Barry is seeking to examine as in when there is a mass 'consolidation', Jones wonders "why are the victims so accepting of their fate?" Why do we play along with the grand game of capitalism? His preliminary conclusion that "This is beyond him", is probably the only plausible reaction to it.

Reading notes: Company by Max Barry was first published in 2006, I read a 2006 US paperback Random House/Vintage paperback edition. It seemed like a long time since the last Max Barry novel. His most recent book The 22 Murders of Madison May was published in 2021) and I haven't caught wind of any new book on the horizon, but then I remembered that there were some early books of his that I hadn't yet read, so this and Syrup went onto the reading pile. Very much looking forward to the next Max Barry, and hopefully not too long a wait for it.