Readers beware, this book is
long. It weighs in at 109,205 words⁰ over 205 pages, spanning 12 fascicles (table of contents at the end).
This feels monumentally excessive.
For comparison, it's longer than
The Hobbit (95,022 words), each of the first three
Harry Potter books (
Prison of Azkaban comes in at 106,821 words) and
Wuthering Heights (107,945 words)¹. You might think that those are not especially long novels but, given its genre,
Application is an epic work of monstrous proportions.
I challenge anyone to read all of
Application in just a weekend. It took me more than a fortnight, having to take breaks between parts, but also frequently mid-part. And I normally
like reading.
One of the difficulties with
Application is that it uses the eccentric conceit of being written "in dialect" - specifically, a dry, long-winded, sesquipedalian variant of English known as "legalese". To be fair, this is
de rigueur for the genre, and
Application suffers from a relatively mild case, remaining mostly comprehensible to anyone well-versed in ordinary English. The only bit of language I was unfamiliar with when I first saw it was "wilful default" (Fs.VI pp.29-30). I initially thought it was a misprint for "wilful deceit", until a conversation with friends enlightened me. Of course, there may be other "false friends" which I didn't recognise and have unknowingly misunderstood entirely! Your personal mileage may naturally vary.
It also doesn't help that the plot is threadbare, and the characters are paper-thin. The protagonist "You" is a complete cipher, who is almost entirely passive and has very little characterisation at all; a classic Audience Surrogate trope. Whereas the main antagonist, "We", is a one-note monomaniacal control freak, who does little but demand that everything be done
exactly their way, constantly. Of the handful of other fleeting characters, one going by the cryptic name "Ombudsman" appears the most rounded and intriguing. I would have liked for them to get more of a role, but from what I gather that would only happen if things started going badly for "You".
For readers that are easily confused by characters with similar names, Fs.VI Annex 5
Your Rights and Responsibilities, will really give you headaches. It discusses the relationship between "We" - referred to by their full name of "HSBC UK Bank plc" - and their close relative, "HSBC Bank plc". Now, I realise that names often run in families so the similarity here has a plot-related justification, but even so, this still feels like bad, clunky writing. Would it have been too much trouble to give the relative a nickname, like our antagonist's "We", to reduce reader confusion?
Another major problem with the length of
Application is repetition. It is common in good writing to repeat a text's core themes in different contexts to make them stand out, but that works best when those themes are few, succinctly stated, and not over-repeated. As an example, "We" appears to have a strong aversion to terrorist financing and money laundering², and
Application explains this, including how "We" uses the details "You" provides to combat those threats (e.g. sharing those details with others). The problem is, it does so at considerable length, and in Fs.I pp.4, Fs.I pp.8, Fs.VI pp.12, Fs.VI pp.18, Fs.VI pp.31, Fs.VII pp.30, and Fs.VII pp.37. Repeating the point three times would have driven it home effectively. Seven times is just overkill.
The themes of ISA Share Dealing Terms, Failed Trades, Best Execution Disclosure, and Conflicts of Interest are similarly repeated what feels like too many times, and at unnecessarily great length. Finally, it feels like more than half of Fs.VIII
Rates and Fees was just copy and pasted from Fs.V
Key Features of HSBC ID & HSBC ID+. Why? Why was it necessary to present me with those tables of numbers twice?
One of the disadvantages of the length of
Application is not just in how much time it takes to actually read everything, but that the length itself is intimidating and off-putting. More than once, I shied away from reading the next few pages simply because of how many there were left to go, only to realise when I restarted that I'd kind of read those pages before, earlier, and already had the gist of them. If the amount of repetition were decreased, the text that remained would feel much more approachable.
Hence,
Application desperately needs the loving attention of a viciously ruthless editor.
Ironically, one area that I thought would have a great deal of repetition, which could actually
help with its reading and understanding, did not. From their titles, Fs.VI
HSBC ID T&Cs and Fs.VII
HSBC ID+ T&Cs would appear to have a great many parallels. I suspected that they would act like a pair of alternate timelines, where the effect of one small decision at the end of Fs.V by "You", would produce narratives that were very similar, differing in a few small but crucial ways. I thought I'd be able to read both parts in parallel, mostly skimming the second where it was identical to the first, but paying careful attention to the places where it diverged. Instead, Fs.VII is written in a completely different voice, from a different perspective, and with a totally different structure, from Fs.VI. If the reader is intended to draw parallels and notice differences between the two possible outcomes of the choice "You" makes, this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. Any such comparison is completely obscured by the decision to tell the parts in radically different ways.
(FWIW, I think structuring these parts in a "choose your own adventure" format would be much better. Having outlined the choice that "You" has to make in Fs.V, it should suffice to ask the reader to pick
either Fs.VI or Fs.VII before continuing to Fs.VIII and beyond, rather than asking them to read both. Sufficiently invested readers can always go back and read the details of the path not taken later, if they so desire.)
One final issue I have (I'm nearly done, I swear) is the fixed two-column portrait-oriented page layout that
Application uses. I understand the reasoning behind a multi-column layout; as the reader's eye scans back from one line to the next, it's harder to pick the correct next line if the lines are too long. Therefore, if you're constrained to A4 paper, a multi-column layout is one of the best ways to prevent this.
But, most people these days won't be reading
Application on A4 paper. They're not printing out 200+ pages of electronic T&Cs documentation to flip through in a comfy chair by the fireplace. They're reading electronic documents on electronic devices, like their computer, or maybe their phone. And the kind of fixed two-column layout used here is almost-universally
terrible on those displays because of the need to
scroll up to the top of the next column, which interrupts the flow of reading down through the document. Not only that, but depending on the display the user might but also have to - even worse -
scroll side-to-side between the columns.
What would be great, on the web, is if there were only some format for describing the structure and contents of a document, allowing each users' device to format it in the way that was best for the reader. That way, the length of
Application would not be exacerbated by the way in which it's presented.
Lastly, a word of warning. Some readers may want to skip Vol I and jump right into Vol II -
Apply for a Sharedealing Account - but you really can't do that here. If you've not already made it through Vol I -
HSBC Bank Account Application - you simply won't have what you need to get through Vol II.
tl;dr - Too long; don't read. (Unless you absolutely have to.)
2/10 - It does what it sets out to do; it just takes way, way, wayyyyyy too long to do it.
Contents
Abbreviations
| T&Cs | Terms and Conditions |
| ID | InvestDirect |
| ID+ | InvestDirect Plus |
| S&S ISA | Stock & Shares ISA |
Vol I - HSBC Bank Account Application (73 pages, 27,375 words)
| Fascicle I | Privacy Notice | 10 pages,
6,273 words |
| Fascicle II | Personal Banking T&Cs and Charges | 54 pages,
17,677 words |
| Fascicle III | Digital Banking Terms for Online and Mobile Banking | 8 pages,
2,827 words |
| Fascicle IV | Glossary of Terms | 1 page,
598 words |
| Fascicle V | Key Features of HSBC ID & HSBC ID+ | 15 pages,
7,561 words |
| Fascicle VI | HSBC ID T&Cs | 39 pages,
26,428 words |
| Fascicle VII | HSBC ID+ T&Cs | 44 pages,
28,846 words |
| Fascicle VIII | Rates and Fees for HSBC ID & HSBC ID+ | 5 pages,
1,347 words |
| Fascicle IX | Key Features of HSBC ID & HSBC ID+ S&S ISA | 10 pages,
4,492 words |
| Fascicle X | HSBC ID S&S ISA T&Cs | 15 pages,
10,127 words |
| Fascicle XI | Financial Services Compensation Scheme information | 2 pages,
1,305 words |
| Fascicle XII | Best Execution Disclosure Statement | 2 pages,
1,724 words |
Footnotes
⁰ By a reasonable estimate. I couldn't get word counts directly from the PDFs, so I did a Select All/Copy/Paste into LibreOffice Writer, and used the word count feature there. That may have included page numbers, or double-counted words hyphenated across line breaks, but the numbers should be in the right ballpark.
¹
Word Count Of Famous Novels² Or so they claim, but the author does have history of being an unconscionably hypocritical douchebag in this regard, like when they were found guilty of not just failures and weaknesses in their regulatory due-diligence departments (as appears to
happen repeatedly for some reason), but actively aided criminals when
its international staff had stripped identifying information on transactions through the U.S. from countries including Iran and Sudan in order to evade sanctions.
