Neil Hopcroft

[Paperback – borrowed]

Incompetence, Bad is the New Good, by Rob Grant

I was slightly disappointed to discover this was a work of fiction rather than a study of incompetence.

It is set in a near-future world where the European Union has turned into the United States of Europe and become overrun with red tape and underserved with competence.

In it we follow the attempts of secret agent Harry Salt to find the killer of his boss and main contact, Dick Klingferm, while he navigates a world where nothing works as it should. Things and systems are broken, people are either completely untrained for their job or unwilling to do it, mostly both.

It starts with incompetence coming thick and fast, after a while it seems to slow down. I don’t know if that was because it slowed in the writing or maybe I became inured to it. Much of it seemed like condensed versions of what we see in our everyday lives, where the systems breaking down are mostly the result of belief by management that it is cheaper to run things that way. Salt has to deal with things that have been like that for long enough that everyone has forgotten why the decision was made, he just sees total inability everywhere he looks.

Of course, he is the one functional person in his own narrative, so I wonder how much he has externalised, and perhaps the world is not quite as bad as it seems from his descriptions.

Overall, a fun book holding a depressing mirror up to show the logical conclusion of some of the worst decisions we could collectively make.