Guy Ware

In The Castle, Kafka’s K never quite manages to penetrate the vague, shape-shifting bureaucracy that dominates life in the village below. Guy Ware has spent three decades inside that Castle, watching the way organizations distort the ideals and better instincts of their employees – including Ware himself.

Stories aren’t how we make sense of the world, just how we explain away our complicity in it. Ware writes to put a face – a clown’s face – to the faceless. He shows us how – often with the best possible intentions – we wind up bending the numbers, robbing a bank, shooting the customers, wrapping a tower block in flammable cladding or debating theology with a tortured prisoner. And he makes it funny – wry smile funny, yes: but snorting down your nose on public transport funny, too – because tragedy retold is farce.

One reviewer called Ware’s first novel an “absurdist bureaucracy thriller” – a genre no one knew existed, but which he has since embraced. With the eye of a seasoned bureaucrat, the deadpan literary suspicion of Samuel Beckett and the funny bone of P.G. Wodehouse, Ware’s writing is an exhilarating blend of bleak satire, meta-fictional games and the blackest of black comedy.

Reading it will make you a smarter, better, less well-adjusted person.