I am not going to apologize for repeating myself, if I made a habit of doing that on this blog I would never find the time to write anything new! So, having finished it I am now repeating and expanding my previous recommendation for a book called Incompetence written by Rob Grant. It is a tale of murder and deception set in the near but, alas, all too foreseeable future in which the new United States of Europe has been formed in all its politically correct lunacy. To describe the book's genre is difficult, suffice to say that it flows in a direct line from Jonathan Swift through Alice in Wonderland via Franz Kafka and George Orwell before receiving its final boost from Monty Python! It is a relatively slim volume which is just as well because I might have done myself an injury as I chuckled, snorted, howled, giggled, convulsed and cried with laughter all the way through it. Mr. Grant appears to be a relatively young man - well, everybody is relatively young to me these days - but he comes across as the grumpy old man's grumpy old man of choice! With radar-guided venom he targets all those pestilential items of modern life which are at best a constant irritation and at worst a downright menace.
Of course, the main 'perp' behind all the madness that afflicts us is that gross behemoth produced by the coupling (dread thought!) of Big Government, in this case the United States of Europe, and Big Business. In one scene our hero finds himself in the deepest, darkest, loneliest part of rural France walking through the countryside trying to find a railway station which he has been assured is at the end of the road. Rounding a bend he comes across it in the middle of nowhere:
The train station was surprisingly modern. It was also surpisingly large. It seemed shockingly out of place and unlikely, nestled in the middle of this primordially rural outback where electricity feared to penetrate and political correctness dared not tread.
There was a vast, paved concourse at the front of the building, with an elaborate fountain of golden mermaids gushing water from their shells as its centrepiece. To the left, a multi-story car park that might have housed thousands of vehicles twisted up into the sky. It looked more like a station that would serve a major European port than a backwater farming community comprising eighteen cows, four tractors and seven men who tilled the land and dated sheep.
There was a huge bank of timetables ranked along the walls by the entrance which seemed to promise that the station was well served by trains. I studied them for some considerable time, trying to find a service that might actually take me closer to civilisation, as opposed to deeper into this pastoral purgatory. Finally I indentified a train that promise to deliver me to Vienna.
Vienna was good. Vienna was where I wanted to be.
Of course, I'd have needed several years of legal training to work out what time the Vienna train ran, or from which platform, because every single service was marked with a bewildering array of caveats and exceptions. The 12.27 service, for instance, didn't run on Sundays or Saturdays or Tuesdays, bank holidays or leap years, unless it had a buffet car that didn't serve hot snacks, in which case it only ran on Wednesdays, though not in August, or on alternate weekdays during officially designated engineering maintainance periods. Provided, naturally, you didn't want a first-class carriage, which was a whole other ball game. This is par for the course in modern railway services. It serves to minimise successful complaints by making it impossible for customers to prove any particular train arrived unreasonably late, or, indeed, was ever meant to arrive at all.
And so on and on, ad absurdum! Needless to say, our hero soon finds out that this vast edifice is manned by just one individual and that none of the trains that hurtle by the various platforms ever stop. You see, this entire governmental project was a mistake built in entirely the wrong place! Yes, I laughed but a bit of me went 'ouch!' because it was all too close to home to be entirely fanciful. Brit readers will remember Blair's Millenium Dome!
A very sharp and very funny book.
