Customer Reviews

Incompetence (GollanczF.)

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

 

 

What a hoot! Right from the first page-nay the first paragraph-I was hooked. As soon as I finished reading it, I read it again-to my wife's bewilderment! I read my favourite lines, paragraphs or sections VERY SLOWLY; reread them; savoured them; only finally relinquishing them up when I craved for the next morsel. I don't know what my suffocated laughter or broad smirks on the train trips to and from work would have seemed like to others. The surgical descriptions of the insanely ridiculous situations our hero (the only sane person in the book) come to mind over and over again: the trip to the hotel and the check-in, the hotel welcoming party, the airline check-in and boarding, alighting from a moving car, boarding of a moving train, the officially dead undead farmer, the roller coaster ride to oblivion. I was trying to visualise, if this were a film, which actors would best fill the roles - the hero: no question, Steve Martin; the policeman with anger management problems: John Cleese; the jail bird - Boldrick from Black Adder.

The closing words suggested a sequel...PLEEEEEASE...

"Incompetence" is a satirical black comedy set in an extreme near-future world. Rob Grant has taken some trends he perceives in modern society, extrapolated them ad absurdum, and had fun seeing how ludicrous he can make the consequences.

The preface to "Incompetence" reads as follows:

"Article 13199 of the Pan European constitution: `No person shall be prejudiced from employment in any capacity at any level by reason of age, race, creed, or incompitence'" (Yes, the spelling mistake is deliberate - I wonder if Rob Grant had the same problem I did in preventing the software he was writing in from automatically correcting it !)

"Incompetence" is described as "A novel of the far too near future" and is set in a united Europe in which "Non Specific Stupidity" is a registered disability which cannot be used to hold back promotion prospects, waiters have Tourette's syndrome, airline pilots have vertigo, etc. The story is told through the eyes of an undercover agent who is not what he appears to be, on the tail of a mass-murderer who is all too competent.

"Incompetence" works well as humorous entertainment: it could be seen as supporting a political view (e.g. hostility to the European Union and to big government), but anyone who reads it for political reasons may be disappointed. And anyone from the US is thinking of buying it for a good laugh at the expense of the Europeans should be aware that the book turns round at the end and delivers a few bites in the other direction.

Overall I found this book to be very amusing and highly recommend it.

If you enjoy "Incompetence" because you enjoy funny writing, and not because you agree or disagree with any particular political view which may be satirised within it, then another book which you may also enjoy is "Jennifer Government" by Max Barry. However, the irony is that while these two books came out at the same time and use much the same type of humour, the trends which they extrapolate ad absurdum and the targets they take aim at are diametrically opposite.

It says something about how complex the trends in our society are that Rob Grant in "Incompetence" and Max Barry in his book could use the same technique to satirise opposite trends and both books contain enough truth to be funny. Perhaps it also demonstrates that satire is so universal in its applicability as to be highly effective as a means of entertainment but much less so as a means of putting over a political argument.

Incompetence is one of those books that just gets better and better as it goes along. The second half of the book is great physical humour and the first a lot of dealing with incompetent bureaucratic humour. Some of the scenes at the start do drag on a little bit such as the interactions with Captain Zuccho, the Italian policeman with anger management issues. Also I pictured the character as a bit older at the start then in the second half when he was a lot better at performing physical stuff like jumping onto a moving train and winning hand to hand combat lethal fights. He doesn't seem to have this badass ability at the start such as the shotgun garbage scene. I think this inconsistency in the character's abilities and traits (well basically the difference in competence levels of Detective Harry Salt) was deliberate and part of the incompetence theme joke of the novel and it worked well.

Basic plot of Incompetence - Detective Harry Salt is an undercover agent. He is summoned from London to Italy by Klingferm, his controller for a face to face meeting with the other two agents Klingferm is responsible for. Salt has never met the other two agents and only met Klingferm in person once or twice, so this in the flesh meeting, must mean something major is going down. Set in the near future where the United States of Europe has passed a law expanding the normal discrimination act to also include no person shall be discriminated against no matter how stupid they are or incompetently they do their job. This means nothing runs smoothly from government departments including the police, to hotels, train stations, car rental agencies and everything in between. Various incompetent staff encounters luckily delay Salt's arrival time for the scheduled meeting and he misses out on being in an elevator that has shot out of the top of a building and come crashing down outside many floors below. Salt investigates much to the anger of Italian authorities and knows someone deliberately tampered with the lift's control buttons and it wasn't just an incompetent lift mechanic, which would have meant no possible prosecution. As Salt tracks the killer he must overcome various incompetents who either deliberately, or just through plain stupidity impede his every move.

In the all-to-near future, the European Union is well on its way to becoming a single federalised state. Unfortunately, due to the passing of Article 13199 of the Pan-European Constitution ("No person shall be prejudiced from employment in any capacity, at any level, by reason of age, race, creed or incompitence,"), the continent is grinding to a halt. One detective is assigned to track down a dangerous killer, but finds his investigation complicated by blind nightclub bouncers, octogenarian male lap-dancers, priapic train stewards and airline ticket salesmen with attention disorders.

Incompetence, originally published in 2003, was the second original novel by Rob Grant, better-known to many SF fans as the co-creator of Red Dwarf. One of Grant's favourite topics, shown sporadically in Dwarf but reaching a kind of insane art form here, is the sheer, mind-numbingly unbelievable insanity that bureaucracy is capable of. Obviously the EU, with its perchance for fining corner-shop greengrocers who sensibly refuse to use measurements its customers find incomprehensible thousands of pounds for each infringement, is a tempting and irresistible target for his humour.

The result is a book driven by the type of comedic raging fury of the kind that Basil Fawlty would have channeled should he have ever chosen to write a novel (although this would be an admittedly difficult task for a fictional character) about the European Union. Our 'hero' is on the trail of a deadly killer but the case is interrupted by every five minutes by increasingly bizarre and convoluted brushes with EU law or regulations. He hires a car, but in the interval between hiring it in the office and crossing the parking lot to where his hire-car is waiting for him, it's been clamped for being parked in the wrong place. Trying to get on a train takes 22 pages of insane, and at times life-threatening, wrangling. The police attempt to stop a runaway car but can't come up with a way of doing it effectively so end up deploying anti-tank weaponry. And so on.

It's a very, very funny book. The laughs start on the first page and don't stop until the last. And it's not even as if the author is really succeeding at making a serious point about the EU. The situations the main character finds himself in are so insanely over-the-top they will almost certainly never happen, although there's a few that do seem somewhat plausible (like the one about the old guy who is accidentally declared dead and his wife receives a fat cheque from the government, so they decide to keep up the pretense he is dead).

In addition to the non-stop comedy and satire, there are a few nice moments of understated writing as well. There's a blink-and-you-miss-it moment towards the end where our (unnamed, by the way, I haven't just forgotten what his name is) protagonist proves how competent he is, even if the rest of Europe isn't. And to be honest the main, more serious plot is never really given a lot of time to develop, due to the constant misadventures and brushes with bureaucracy along the way.

But that's not too much of a problem. Incompetence (****) is extremely funny from start to finish and constantly entertaining. The book is available now in the UK, but unsurprisingly not in the USA (possibly for fear that Americans would accept it as a serious and well-informed factual book about the EU), although Amazon.com has some import copies available.

If, like me, you read the other reviews of this book, you would probably expect that it's a scathing indictment of political correctness, over-regulation of society, and government inefficiency. You'd probably also expect that it was riotously funny. I'm going to have to shoot a few arrows at those myths.

Let me establish my bona fides: I'm a Red Dwarf fan, and as all proper fans I think the show declined greatly in quality when Grant left. And when I heard about this book I ordered it from England and waited impatiently for it to arrive ... only to be underwhelmed, then moderately enthused, then entirely let down.

The book is somewhat about what people claim: a future united Europe that has a mind-crushing number of idiotic laws and regulations, culminating in the ridiculous law that people cannot be fired for being incompetent at their job. But this is really just a background hook. The primary storyline is a rather unimpressive spy tale, with the author writing in first person about himself being a super-spy for the EU, tracking down a killer he calls "Johnny Appleseed". The details of the case are rather boring and trite, and the author can't resist a few ego-boosting plot developments and character traits (at first he is described as fat, but his description slims down as the book continues, then he tels us he has a "great ass", and there is of course the scene where the impossibly hot and impossibly smart femme fatale falls for him within the space of five minutes).

Weaving the story together are background tales of a cop with anger management issues, airlines whose pilots can't land planes, gigantic train stations that have no customers, and eighty-year-old male lap dancers ... all due to a gigantic and idiotic bureaucracy. There's even one bit where the hero is arrested and taken to a jail which is constantly being expanded downwards to house the ever-growing number of violators of innumerable, pointless laws.

But with only a few exceptions, these scenes aren't particularly funny, and rarely rely on the hook. And some of them just drag on beyond the point of insanity. The bit about faking passing out to get a first class seat is genuinely hilarious, as is the description of the ill-fated dinner party. But the bit regarding jumping onto a train while it's moving lasts entirely too long, as does the end scene in a roller-coaster car. Most of the rest of the book is just unremarkable, marking time to fill pages.

It's also a bit weird to try to figure out what Grant is trying to say, if anything, particularly given the ending. After spending the whole book running down the EU (and, bizarrely, engaging in constant ethnic slurs against Chinese people), Grant decides to make the villain an American spy randomly killing innocent civilians to disrupt the EU and make England the 51st state. Why? So he can engage in some bizarre anti-American rants, the most hilarious of which is when he tries to insult America for "having its own national sports nobody else plays". Um, right, nobody plays baseball and basketball. And soccer - the sport of which Europeans are so proud because the 'whole world plays it' - is only played around the world because of European imperialism. If the US took over every country and relegated their citizens to second- or third-class status, then forced them to learn American sports at gunpoint, those sports would be world sensations as well. Funny that a person who can drop bizarre facts around like a know-it-all at a party could be so culturally blind.

So it's a bit of a drag. Overall a rather inconsequential and by-the-numbers spy story with an awful ending, and a few tales of incompetence and bizarre mishaps sprinkled in - some funny, some tiresome - to keep it rolling. Not exactly a travesty, but not a novel I'd particularly recommend.

I bought this book after reading that it was as funny as Hitchhiker's Guide, which I really enjoyed a few years ago.
And I totally agree. I rarely laugh out loud when reading comedy, but I did several times while reading this book. I highly recommend it.