Company (Vintage Contemporaries) (Paperback)

Stephen Jones, a young recruit with shoes so new they squeak, reports for his first day in the Training Sales Department and finds it gripped by a crisis involving the theft of a donut. In short order, the guilty party is identified and banished from the premises and Stephen is promoted from assistant to sales rep. He does his best to fit in with his fellow workers-among them a gorgeous receptionist who earns more than anyone else, and a sales rep who's so emotionally involved with her job that she uses relationship books as sales manuals-but Stephen is nagged by a feeling that the company is hiding something. Something that explains why when people are fired, they are never heard from again; why every manager has a copy of the Omega Management System; and most of all, why nobody in the company knows what it does.
Both of Max's last books kept me up reading into the wee early hours and I am hopping up and down in anticipation of his next General Smedley Butler'n adventure.

Stephen Jones is so excited about his first job. He is even promoted the first day of his new job. But, there is something that is strange about Zephyr. As Freddy points out to Jones early on: "The thing is, there's plenty about Zephyr that makes no sense." The other problem with Jones is that he asks too many questions. For one, he wants to know exactly what Zephyr does. Zephyr has its own style, for sure. The numbering of the floors in the elevator is in reverse order (so the lowest on the totem pole, the bottom floors, have the highest numbers, while the top-floor CEO is on floor 1. Jones should realize that things are done differently here, when on the first day he learns that he's on the books as copy paper, so they can process his salary as an expense, and someone gets fired over eating a donut.

Max Barry has written another original. The American Corporation, where it seems that outsourcing, downsizing, consolidation and saving are the buzzwords. Each company moves to the sizzle of the latest management book, in this case “Omega Management System”. The characters are silly and sometimes a little boring, but the overall message comes roaring through.

Zephyr Holdings is the nameless, faceless corporation that we all think we know. Stephen Jones is the new employee with such zest and zeal that discovering what the company actually does is a worthwhile mission. The mission statement is so full of words and without meaning that we recognize we may “have been there, done that”. Zephyr gives us a face that we can denigrate without really understanding what the business world is really all about. Stephen Jones uncovers all that is held dear, and that most employees don’t want to know. Max Barry has given us a novel of satire but somehow we aren’t too sure what we have here. Recommended. prisrob January 2006