Incompetence

Right from the brilliant cover design and the amusing frontispiece, I thought this would be a fun read.
Rob Grant didn't disappoint...the plot is fairly slight, but gives ample opportunity to amusingly demonstrate the incompetence of the United States of Europe.
For all the deliberate absurdity of the situations, somehow they don't seem that large a step from the modern world!
Good fun.

Incompetence is full of great humour, witty one liners and amusing thoughts. Rob Grant has a unique and old school sense of humour, which is undeniably English to the core. Incompetence is a great showcase for Grant, unleashing his style in a futuristic Europe, where stupidity is norm. Incompetence fails in the long term though. Despite the persistent humour, the actual story is rather mundane, through to a rather routine finale. With a better structure this book could have been great, however as it stands it remains good, if a little laborious at times.

A fast moving comedy thriller, chock full of influences but with a distinctive Red dwarf feel, not least in a seemingly hapless hero Harry Salt. Harry Salt has other aliases including Mr Tequila, in fact everything but the Lime, and the plot is very Third Man-ish. Its frenetic pace and endless pain for the hero also reminded me of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male.

I enjoyed it for its pace and dystopia, but found the grumpy old man stuff a little tedious - and I am a GOM. There is only so much you can read about footwear made of vegetables and ways in which train seats are uncomfortable before you start to lose the will to live - felt like padding. It's also not one for the detective story purists, as this is a first person narrative, and show more as we are supposed to know what Harry knows, it really is cheating to reveal the fact that he can kill a man with one strike, with his bare hands, right at the end of the book. show less

This book reminds of the old adage about the parson's egg - it was good in parts. As a Red Dwarf fan, I think I've figured out each of the writer's roles in that series by reading Rob Grant's solo work..... Mr Grant wrote the jokes while Mr Naylor kept them on a (relatively) straightforward plot arc.

And that's where Incompetence fell down for me - there were some great 'set pieces' and jokes in this book, but I kept having the feeling that Rob wasn't actually sure of where he was going with the story and just kept tacking one episode on top of another until the end of the book.

Still, the jokes were often REALLY good, and I'm glad I've had a chance to read this one....

This book reminded me a lot of Jennifer Goverment by Max Berry. It is set in a not too distant future where the United States of Europe have made it illegal to fire someone based on their incompetence. But this scenario is just the backdrop for a funny quickpaced espionage thriller.
While I could have done without some of the rants and instead would have wanted some more background on the whole espionage and futuristic setting, I enjoyed the book and it's premises. 8 points for originality and readability. The end seems to be set up for a sequel..

Fun little satire of a book. The sort of thing that I would recommend reading on holiday - not too taxing but a good read to have sat outside in the sunshine with a nice drink. Semi-reminiscent of the Red Dwarf series in the sense that it shares a lot of the same humour - mostly simple and silly observations about people. Still, rather entertaining and worth picking up.

I know that I originally picked up this book because of the connection to red dwarf, one of the few Tv series in recent years that is both science fiction and brittish. What I liked most about this book is the fact that the humor and situations were britished based, narry an american in site.
The basic humor in the book is based on the premise that anti discrimination legislation had been taken to extreams, you can nolonger be sacked, or discriminatied against for being obviously incapable of doing a job. leading to lots of people being in positions that they are completly incapable of doing. The main character than has to navigate this world and live with the consequences. The main character is obvously capable but is thwarted by the show more situations that this puts himself in.

When he hires a car he finds that the person issuing the cars is incapable of going through a simple checklist with him, so he signs anyweay and finds that the car is missing an important componant that means he cannot drive away. this leads him to in the end hire another car as he cannot, after a humerous try to make it work, dirive it at all.
this book is impossible to discribe well, you will simply have to read it show less