Customer Reviews

Company

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Only 336 pages of story, yet it takes about 100 to get off the ground. It's interesting for a while (if you use that term loosely), but gets old very quickly, especially at the climax.

Perhaps you have to have been part of it to get it?

I found my way to Max Barry through his previous book "Jennifer Government." The reason I read JG was because of my interest in sf and dystopic writing, and JG was recommended to me as a result. I wasn't expecting it to be so funny, however, and after finishing the book, I was hooked. As soon as I found "Company" on Amazon, I preordered it. (Okay, I'm cheap, I pre-ordered the paperback.)

There's a lot to love about "Company." The idealistic hero of the story who goes up against both the big company and shadow government and successfully winning a huge victory for the oppressed working underclass is certainly something that every office worker dreams about. From a literary standpoint, there's a lot going on at the symbolic level that makes you think, too: there's a siren that attempts to pull down the hero, an ambitious warlord who takes advantage of chaos to consolidate his own power, and a mother figure emerging from the events of the novel hopeful and unscathed. Finally, I believe there was even a reference to the October Revolution in 1917 in the closing pages of the book, effectively foreshadowed by one of the company's receptionists earlier on. Is the book a veiled allusion to the Worker's Paradise? Hard to say, but certainly there are literary tropes and allusions that make the book stand out on multiple levels. The fun part about Company, however, is that if you don't want to have to think about all this literary nonsense, you don't have to - the book stands alone as a wildly entertaining story on the surface level, too.

And just like JG, Company is tremendously funny. I read the book over the course of six hours and laughed out loud at least ten times. It's incredibly entertaining and makes you think - what more could you want? An excellent book by Max Powers, well worth your time.