Book Review - Incompetence by Rob Grant

Reposted on 2012-02-23 from defunct blog

Book Review: Incompetence by Rob Grant
 
"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.'"
 
So starts Rob Grant's (co-creator of Red Dwarf) novel Incompetence.

I definitely found this book laugh out loud. Anyone who knows what is happening in the European Union (or as the book refers to it: US of E - United States of Europe) should consider reading this satire.

The story follows US of E secret service detective Harry Salt, aka Harry Pepper, aka Harry Tequila, aka Cardew Vascular, on his wild goose chase across Europe to find the identity of the man who set up the perfect murders.

On his way Harry loses his rare leather shoes, having to walk most of the story in vegetable hide shoes, with Roman police officer Captain Zuccho, a man with anger management problems, on his tail.

Throughout Harry's journey he encounters every type of incompetent person to slow down his mission to stop the man who could single handily bring down the US of E - if it were not already so precariously unstable.

A couple of quotes I particularly enjoy:

On European winters (Prologue, pg 32):

Snow is more than beautiful. Snow is Nature's Tippex: it covers up mistakes and ugliness. You can put a carpet of snow over Nagasaki, it probably looks like the Ice Queen's castle. Even the stinkiest, most crap-strewn streets of London's grimmest thoroughfares take on a fairy-tale, virgin beauty under the thinnest skein of snow.

            If you can actually get to them.
            Because, in London, of course, we always have the wrong kind of snow. All public transport is rendered instantly static and useless by the merest hint of a flurry of white. Moscow, on the other hand, always seems to get exactly the right kind of snow, somehow, and gets it with humiliating frequency, too. In Moscow snow, poorly built and ancient trains, trams and buses plough on about their business through twenty-foot drifts and swirling blizzards without missing a beat on the timetable. Here, as soon as the first flake falls, train points are frozen, engines seize up and tyres spin ineffectually on roads that instantly become giant ice-dance venues for buses to demonstrate their pirouetting virtuosity. We should try importing some of that good stuff, some of that Moscow snow. Then, maybe, we wouldn't get caught by surprise every God-damned year, when unpredictably, it snows exactly the same kind of surprisingly wrong snow it did last year, and the entire Thames Valley might not be thrown back to the Mesozoic era for the duration of the winter.

On walking (Twenty-Four, pg 180):
            Walking is primitive. Let's face it: walking was invented by monkeys, and even they don't like doing too much of it. They break it up every once in a while by swinging through some trees, to speed things up a little. Walking is a stupid way of getting from A to B, or any other capital letter for that matter. It's slow, it's ponderous, it's dull and it requires an uncommon amount of effort for scant reward.