Company – Max Barry

Rating: 3 stars

I’ve been searching for books that are similar to mine for comps (namely, satire), so that’s why I picked up Company. And I liked it, but I didn’t like it either, mostly because it’s too Gen-X.

Okay, the plot. The protagonist, Steve, starts at a new company, Zephyr. There are some antics, and that’s where the book first felt wrong. It felt kinda like an episode of The Office. Given that this was written in 2005 and the author worked at HP for a long time, I’m pretty sure that’s because of me and comparisons to The Office aren’t his intent, but the point remains: the plot’s too self-aware at the beginning. Obviously, if anyone talks about satire they talk about A Modest Proposal. However, the comedy comes form the cognitive process of asking “why is the author talking about this as if it’s meaningful?”, not from the protagonist getting flustered and asking himself that question. Basically, I like it being more tongue-in-cheek, less explicit.

I don’t want to say that the story is all that. The book gets better from there, after the first third of the beginning. And even there it’s not all that, but sometimes there it overreaches. Soon enough the protagonist finds out that the corporation is basically false. Everyone working there is so that a secret team (Alpha) can test the effects of various managerial philosophies. They’re so secret, in fact, that the actual managers and senior managements don’t know about it and are part of what’s being tested.

I’m going to skip ahead because I want to say what my problem was. I like the climax, where the protagonist gets the company to effectively unionize (but no, not unionize, that’s a dirty word and something not even the exploited workers want) and then reveals how the suffering and really unfair policies of the company (such as effectively firing women when they get pregnant even though technically they aren’t) are arbitrary. The corporate reorganizations and people losing their jobs are done for no reason but results in real people having their lives upset.

The protagonist represents democracy (in the corporate process), even going so far as quoting a lightly-edited passage from the declaration of independence regarding work. His main antagonist roughly represents soulless, heartless, sociopathic corporate profiteering. She feels like a living embodiment of anyone who employs outsourcing to 3rd world countries. In a shorter summary, I’d say she is someone that earnestly believes that work will set you (never her) free. So I’d say I like that the author is taking a stance that workers (labors) are as or more important than managers (capital) as far as a company goes.

Then the part I don’t like. The author walks back all that in a concession. The company doesn’t work well without the labor class controlling everything. And the very end, after everything has collapsed and the workers openly riot and injure the Alpha team, months after the dust settles, the author is on a speaking tour (so he doesn’t seem to really care about workers controlling the company because he’s talking to managers, not the workers). Eve confronts the Steve (now that I think about it, I’m sure that’s a joke), and he’s perfectly fine with her going on to a different job and doing the same thing as him but with an entirely different message. He has no problem with this, even though that was the whole point of the story at Zephyr. She specifically confronts him on this, that he should try to stop her, but he says that he only pities her. So as long as it’s not in his field of view, he has no problem with the working class being exploited. And that’s why I was talking about the author being Gen X.