Funny In Different Ways

I finally finished The Love Secrets of Don Juan by Tim Lott and Jennifer Government by Max Barry this week. I still have a long way to go to finish the rest of my Must-Finish-Reading-Now! List. This, while, my To-Be-Read-Shelves are filling up by the week.

Jennifer Government is set sometime in the future where the world is divided into US Federated and non-US Federated Economic Bloc countries, and governed by corporations. The corporations, meantime, belong to either one of two loyalty programs, Team Advantage and US Alliance.

Everyone speaks with an American accent. Australia, New Zealand and many other countries are part of USA (Malaysia included, according to the map furnished at the beginning of the book).

Each individual is identified by their employer so if you work for Nike, your name is John Nike. If you switch jobs to Pepsi, then your name is John Pepsi. If you're unemployed, well, you're just John. No one wants to be 'just John' so nobody admits to being unemployed.

The heroine of the story, Jennifer Government is (obviously) a government agent (with a cool barcode tattoo under her left eye) assigned to investigate and apprehend those responsible for the killings of 14 people whose apparent common thread (and bad luck) was to purchase a pair of coveted Nike shoes.

Why and how this happens is unveiled very much early in the story so this is no whodunit. If you thought businesses today are run ruthlessly, those companies are just sugar and spice when compared to the corporations in Jennifer Government.

So we get drawn into the chase as JGo goes after the perpetrators and tries to pin them down. The story shuttles between Australia and US. The plot twists and the characters can be hard to follow at first but once you get a grasp of how the system works, it's pretty fun-going.

I found Jennifer Government scary and funny at the same time. Scary because I really think things can go this way, if not in my lifetime, in the next, and funny because the author injects an unapologetic, wacky sense of humour into it.

Max Barry is Australian so you can't help wonder if he's really taking the mickey out of American consumerism and our obsession with brands. It’s not a story where you should take too seriously but it’s still enough to make you aware of the possibility that something like it could happen.

There are bits where it's pretty out there, especially where killings and anarchy are nonchalantly accepted, but taken in the spirit of the dark satire that it is, Jennifer Government presents a refreshing view of how consumerism (or is it capitalism?) can make a devil out of you.

While both books were funny, Love Secrets is not fast and rollicking in the way that Jennifer Government is. It's a slow burn, an introspective humourous analysis of lessons in love as learnt and recalled by one Daniel 'Spike' Savage.

He's going through a bitter divorce and upon his therapist's suggestion, decides to put on paper, by way of a flip chart, the experiences he has had with women, the lessons learnt from them and thus, how not to cock things up again.

There's an air of desperation throughout as Daniel rushes to meet an unannounced deadline as he contemplates what has been, what is and what he hopes to achieve by doing this. Through flashbacks, we meet the 3 Great Women of his life (because apparently everyone has the '3 Great Ones' of their life) and with the benefit of his hindsight, get to see what went wrong and what effect they had on him.

There's not much dialogue in this book. Even so, I couldn't help but be engaged and drawn into his reflections and theories of men-women relationship, and found myself marking out paragraphs which I felt were spot-on.

Midway, he gets a bit psycho (but then again, don't all of us at some point or another get that way too when in a relationship?) but I couldn't help but root for the guy, even though I was a bit disappointed with the ending.

And that's why The Love Secrets of Don Juan was a good read. It reminded me that in life, the ending that you get is not necessarily the one that you expect.

"I'm lonely, and sometimes I'm desperate and want to die. But it passes. Everything passes. Even the belief that everything passes, passes. So next week, I'm going out on a date - in the hope that the collapse of my belief in the future will pass. I'm aware that you're meant to feel great about yourself before you start dating. I know that you only find someone when you're not looking, when you don't care. But that's unrealistic. Everybody cares. Nobody feels great about themselves. The thing is to pretend. To learn to lie."

Interview with Tim Lott from The Scotsman

Interviews with Max Barry:
Weekly Dig
Suicide Girls