Book review: Company by Max Barry

Book: Company
Author: Max Barry
Year Published: 2006

Review:  The protagonist of Company is Stephen Jones, a recent graduate of an unnamed business school. He is hired by Zephyr Corporation, where he is quickly assigned to a cube in the cube farm. His colleagues are cynical, some are power hungry, some are burned out, all are turned into cogs by senior management, who communicate in much-forwarded e-mails, and refer to employees as "head-counts".

One of his colleagues is obsessed with finding out who took his donut. People are hung-up about which parking space each of them gets and which coat hook they use. And no one knows what the company actually does - nor do they care.

 Company is like a novelized version of Dilbert, where almost nothing makes any sense, but it's all funny (if it isn't happening to you). It's also something like what Kafka might write, if he was alive today in America or another western country, and had a wicked sense of humor.

 Jones quickly discovers that no one at Zephyr has any idea what the company actually does. But, early on in the novel, Jones is recruited by Alpha, a corporation within a corporation, and discovers that the entire company is really an experiment in management techniques, and that all the hundred of employees are merely guinea pigs. Zephyr doesn't actually do anything, it exists merely to allow the people at Alpha to see how they can maximize the productivity of human resources.

They arbitrarily decide that certain people will never be promoted. They invent day long meetings that serve no purpose at all. They fire people to see how long it takes others to adjust, and invent other corporations so that no one communicates with former employees.

The members of Alpha are all smart and ruthless, but are also all amoral and even sociopathic. They've completely divorced themselves from realizing that the employees are human beings. Jones rebels against this, but is almost corrupted by Eve, a stunningly beautiful Alpha, who is the most ruthless of the lot.

  I liked Company and I don't even work for a corporation. If you like satire, you will probably like it too.


About the Author: Max Barry is an Australian writer born in 1973, and is a former employee of Hewlett Packard. Company is his third novel, after Syrup (which I have not read) and Jennifer Government which is also very funny and very dark.