The Bezzle (Cory Doctorow) – book review

Science fiction author Cory Doctorow has taken a stand against big corporations, in particular the use of Digital Media Rights to lock people into particular companies. So much so that the audio version of his new book, The Bezzle and the previous book in this series, are being offered through Kickstarter rather than through Audible (Amazon). This little bit of background might give prospective readers an idea of where Doctorow is coming from in this particular series in which his protagonist is a forensic accountant and his targets are dirty corporations.

Doctorow introduced forensic accountant Martin Hench in Red Team Blues. That book was a day after tomorrow thriller about crypto-currency. No knowledge of that book is required to enjoy The Bezzle which is a flashback novel, set in 2006 and charts Hench’s involvement in bringing down a local Ponzi scheme and then becoming an expert on the privatised Californian prison system. Doctrow is using Hench to explore various periods in US corporate history. A third Hench book Picks and Shovels, due in 2025, will take Hench back to his early days in the 1980s and the rise of the tech giants

The Bezzle starts in the town of Avalon on Catalina Island, a playground for the wealthy off the coast of California. Hench is taken there by his friend Scott Warms, who has made his own money by selling out to Yahoo!. The pair soon find that the population of the island have become the financial playthings of a super-rich investor. It is in this section of the book that readers learn the meaning of the title: ‘The Bezzle’ is a term coined in the 1930s to describe the time between when a con starts and where everyone is happy as they believe they are making money and the moment that they realise the reality and that there is not enough money to go round. The rest of the book involves Hench’s investigation into the California prison system which was privatised and sold off to private equity firms to the benefit of the state and the great disbenefit and cost of the inmates.

There is plenty of explanation and exposition in The Bezzle, but it is fascinating and engagingly delivered by Hench. The whole story is also pretty depressing as Doctorow, through Hench, takes apart the greed that fuels American society and the breaks constantly being given to big business at the expense of the populace all in the name of making money. The Bezzle is a bit of an angry book, but Hench never gets angry, he just methodically gets even, which is much more satisfying.

In the Martin Hench books Cory Doctorow has created an unlikely but extremely likeable hero who gives him a vehicle for exploring and exposing the worst of American corporate excess. The Bezzle is a fascinating and scary look at what Doctorow calls the “shitty technology adoption curve” where “tech’s worst ideas are sanded down on the bodies of the people least able to defend themselves… before those bad ideas are imposed on the rest of us.” With the inexorable rise of technology these issue impact on all of our lives. And we can only respond and take action if we understand them.

Robert Goodman
For more of Robert’s reviews, visit his blog Pile By the Bed

Other reviews you might enjoy:

• Locked Ward (Anne Buist) – book review
• The Future (Naomi Alderman) – book review
• The Candy House (Jennifer Egan) – book review