[I] spent three years earning A$33,000 [HK$218,000] a year while pretending to be a high-flying sales rep,' he says.

It was, after all, at his old job that Barry wrote his first novel, Syrup - the tale of a young advertising executive at Coca-Cola - almost exclusively on his lunch breaks in the passenger seat of his 1979 Toyota Corolla.

'I borrowed a laptop and I'd go out and type away for 40 minutes and get back to work,' he says. Thus he was able to escape the corporate world and simultaneously include his experiences in his writing.

'I felt like I was achieving nothing every day - I'd be selling computers and by the end of the financial year my quota would be reset and I would be struck by the sense that I had done nothing with my life,' he says. 'I could see myself losing years that way. But by writing 400 words on my laptop during my lunch break I felt that I'd created something that would never go away.'

The book gave Barry, a business major at Melbourne's Monash university, a chance to portray what he considers the modus operandi of the modern corporation.

'Marketeers work not by lying to you outright,' he says, 'but by taking you to a certain point and leading you to conclusions when there simply are none. For example, I began noticing the prevalence of the 'special' tag at supermarkets applied to items that aren't reduced in price, they're just 'special' somehow.'

The genre is not without its pitfalls and Barry acknowledges that satirising the moral outlook of companies unashamedly driven by profit is challenging.

'It's impossible to keep ahead of the corporate world - you have to ask yourself what you would do if you had no morals or ethics and would do absolutely anything to sell a product.'

It was Barry's second book, Jennifer Government, that made his name as a novelist. Set in a future dystopia in a world largely controlled by big companies, the science-fiction farce satirises the social fallout of a world overrun by privatisation. Translated into 10 languages and optioned by Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney's Section 8 Films, it won Barry a cult following worldwide.

Yet despite his international success, Barry's work remains largely unrecognised in Australia - something he hopes to remedy with his new book, the film version of which is in production with Universal Pictures.

Barry describes his latest offering as 'the novel where I set out to write a satire of the environment, of the system really. I wanted to write a book that said everything I have to say about corporate culture and working for a big company.'

The story follows the progress of Stephen Jones, an ambitious new employee at Zephyr Holdings, a Seattle company that to most appears indistinguishable from any other successful corporation. But it soon emerges that none of Jones' fellow employees has the slightest idea what the company does.

This doesn't stop Zephyr Holdings from appearing to be just like any other corporate environment: a large and dreary company headquarters populated by characters familiar to anyone who's worked in an office - Freddy the prodigious smoker and mediocre middle manager; Gretel, the quiet, polite receptionist and Roger, the status-driven sales rep, obsessed with the possibility that he might miss out on his morning doughnut: 'Keen observers note the reduced mass straight away but stay silent, because saying, 'Hey, is that only seven doughnuts?' would betray their doughnut experience. It's not great for your career to be known as the person who can spot the difference between seven and eight doughnuts at a glance.'

Into a suspenseful plot Barry deftly weaves observations about the social impact of corporate culture, conjuring up a work that reads something like Franz Kafka and Agatha Christie collaborating on a Dilbert comic.

Many of Barry's observations, right down to the persistent motif of missing doughnuts, come first-hand from Hewlett-Packard, which he describes with a beguiling mix of fondness and terror as the place where he learned that 'corporations are self-contained worlds with their own standards of what's right and wrong'.

'Every day we'd have morning snacks,' he says. 'Once a week it was doughnuts and from the outside it would seem insane that anyone would care about something so insignificant as a doughnut - but in the corporate environment it was more about the presence of this scarce resource and the status that came with it. So on doughnut day all these sales reps, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, would appear and the doughnuts would go out and if one of these guys didn't get their doughnut, it was a major social embarrassment.'

There's something of Leo Rosten's adage about satire being nothing more than focused bitterness in Barry's work. His novels, he says, are about the way corporations can extract immoral behaviour from otherwise reasonable people: 'No single person at Enron or WorldCom or James Hardie ever said 'I don't care about the workers'. There were always people who said they did.

But because of the way corporate decisions are made, not by any single person but by lots of different people in compartments, each person can make a slightly unethical decision and can soon contribute to what is a very unethical decision in its totality.

'It's not a coincidence these things happen. It's not the case that these managers each happened to be bad eggs. It's that we have these structures that allow bad things to happen systematically.'

Barry says the behaviour of corporations is due to their tendency to attract the socially dysfunctional to their management positions - those willing to sacrifice their social and family lives for financial gain.

'The sort of person that rises up through the ranks to become a manager of a big corporation most of the time I'd say is not a healthy person, emotionally or socially. Any time there's a corporate scandal we always look for the one or two or three people who must have made decisions - the bad apples - but we need to look for the systemic factors that lead to them.'

On the question of whether capitalism is immoral Barry remains agnostic: 'There's a common tendency to equate corporations with capitalism, but in fact from the inside they're these totalitarian structures, little Soviet Unions, where the decisions are handed down from on high.

'In many cases they're these little outposts of socialism always lobbying the government for protection and trying to reduce the amount of competition they face.

I consider myself reasonably pro-capitalist and think in terms of producing goods and services.

I tend to think that corporations are more anti-capitalist than I am.'

Writer's notes

Genre Satire

Born and lives Melbourne, Australia

Age 34

Family Married with a daughter, Fin, aged one

Latest book Company (Doubleday)

Previous titles Two novels, Syrup and Jennifer Government

What the papers say '[Explores] the secrets and lies of corporate culture with sharp, absurdist precision. Joseph Heller did it better, but not by much.' - The New York Times

'Barry's narrative voice shifts subtly to embrace the idiom of each character and he is caustically funny in the small details.' - The Observer

Author's bookshelf

Apathy and Other Small Victories by Paul Neilan

'Funniest book I've ever read despite being totally unknown everywhere in the world. It's about a guy who's so apathetic he doesn't really want to do anything, but gets caught up in a murder mystery. It's hilarious.'

The Baroque Circle by Neal Stephenson

'A sprawling historical drama. I think everything he's done is fantastic ... but everyone I've recommended them to has said they're terrible.'

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

'I didn't start out wanting to read this but felt it had been too long since I'd read a Booker Prize winner. Excellent book with an ending that makes you question everything you've read up to that point.'

The Astonishing X-Men Series by Joss Whedon

'I read tons of X-Men comics at high school and university. I'm just getting back into them after my second novel, Jennifer Government, was featured in a Superman comic.'

Girls Will Be Girls: Raising Confident and Courageous Daughters by JoAnn Deak

'I've been reading a lot of parenting books since the birth of my child and this is fantastic. I wish I'd read it when I was 16 and was desperately trying to figure out how women worked.'