Accrual World

First, an admission: I read only to page 40. But unless it turns into Catch 22 on page 41, Accrual World won’t be entering the ranks of classic satirical fiction. It is a sinfully awful book.

It tells the tale of a quasi-futuristic Britain in which accountancy – for reasons too implausible and contrived to go into here – has been outlawed and financial systems are on the brink of meltdown.

This is used as an excuse for a slew of duff gags about bookkeepers, bankers, political activists and government ministers, as a small band of renegade accountants fight back against the oppression of the ruling Britannic Party.

Therein lies the largest of Accrual World’s myriad problems: it’s a comedy novel that isn’t funny. And it’s badly written. Boy, is it badly written.

The book was conceived about two years ago by its publisher, CCH, as a series of monthly online chapters aimed at second-guessing the next stage of the then burgeoning credit crunch. At some point, attempted prescience mutated into wild fantasy, which no one was able to put into words with any élan.

Almost every sentence stinks as much as the pun of the novel’s title. Clichés abound, while the dialogue is clunky and mostly consists of exposition.

Wholly unlikeable characters are constantly (and ungrammatically) explaining plot points to one another at great length – and they’re rarely reported to have simply ‘said’ their pieces. They ‘snorted’, ’groaned’, ‘nodded sympathetically’, ‘mused… theatrically’ and so on.

This is another glaring item in the litany of woes one can attribute to Accrual World: it is amateurishly and boringly overcooked. The nature and appearance of everything is described on every page, from facial features to the furniture.

To be fair to the author, Andy Blackford, he’s a marketer, not a novelist; one wonders, then, why he took on the task of writing a satire for a respectable business publisher like CCH.

It’s a cruel world indeed. Don’t make it any worse for yourself by reading this book.

Accrual World is available online as a downloadable PDF. There are also 500 free print copies on offer to accountants who email a request.

Issue: 4219 / Categories: Reviews