If you have ever felt that your chosen vocation does not represent the real you and that vague realisation has left you feeling rudderless, agitated and even depressed, then you will understand ‘The Trials of Max Pipe.’
In its extreme form, this kind of internal conflict may be debilitating. Imagine, for example, that all you wish to do is to create art, but you trained as an accountant and through your practice of accountancy, you are generally regarded as a success in all the usual ways. Deep inside though, you know you are a charlatan. Yes, you earn a living, but you know that you are being untrue to yourself. According to Jung, this conflict between individual and corporate cultures, may be suppressed to the extent that it is experienced only as unresolved anguish.
This is Max Pipe – a successful corporate man who would be an artist if he could. But the story is about more than Max. It is about business, unrequited love, Italians and Englishmen, espionage, and staggering ineptitude.
‘The Trials of Max Pipe’ is a story for readers who I think of as having a taste for satire and especially the surreal and who may have observed at first-hand, as I have, the often comical nature of corporate business.
In a Nutshell
And so…the discovery of extraordinary new art by London gallery owner Jasper Fog, excites aficionados and those without an artistic bone alike, but the identity of the artist is known only to the mail boy of kettle manufacturer, Martin & Underwood (M&U) of Liverpool.
Coincidentally, Max Pipe is a manager at M&U. In his imagination however, he is the project manager of the construction of a revolutionary warship for the Italian Navy, by Martino & Umberto of Catania.
The story begins by describing, through the eyes of Fog, the singular art and the mystery of the unknown artist. It then proceeds in the first person, with Pipe narrating his imaginary role overseeing the warship construction. For person(s) unknown, he describes the furious machinations of his mercurial and threatening Italian colleagues, sinister espionage and team building; and then the most terrible of botch-ups, when the futuristic kettle design of his venerable colleague Ted Craxi is combined, at Pipe’s careless direction with the Navy’s specifications for the new warship.
When the mistake is discovered, it is too late…Martino & Umberto has constructed a three thousand tonne kettle-ship equipped with armaments that the Navy is most unlikely to want.
A violent end to Pipe’s life is nigh but his ‘genius’ for business strategy is again revealed and all turns out for the best. Except it doesn’t. And I must say no more.