Set in the Miller Shanks advertising agency,e. chronicles, in
e-mail form, the staff's pursuit of life, love and the Holy Grail
of advertising, the Coca-Cola account. An e-mail epistolary novel
must have sounded terribly innovative when it was first suggested,
but its novelty value wears very thin very quickly. Rather like the
medium it celebrates, e.is soulless soundbites that only serve to
confirm all your worst fears about the world of advertising.
Overburdened with shallow people chasing shallow concepts, the
book, like its characters has no depth, warmth, precious little
real humour and absolutely no relevance to life in the real world
as the rest of us know it. As a colossal in-joke for advertising
minions, this may be an adequate party piece, but as a mainstream
novel it is flat, boring and uninteresting. What plot there is, is
lost in a welter of lame running jokes about Helsinki, crass
innuendo, bad language, and characters so one-dimensional they do
not even qualify as cliches. The jacket blurb tells us that the
author is a copywriter who has been, fired by some of London's
leading ad agencies. If this is an example of his unfettered
creativity, it's hardly surprising. (Kirkus UK)
Consisting entirely of staff email, 'e' spends a fortnight in the company of Miller Shanks, an advertising agency that scales dizzying peaks of incompetence. Among the cast are a CEO with an MBA from the Joseph Stalin School of Management, a Creative Director who is a genius, if only in his own head, designers and copywriters driven by breasts, beer or Bach Flower Remedies, and secretaries who drip honey and spit blood.
The novel is a tapestry of insincerity, backstabbing and blatant bitchiness: that is to say, everyday office politics. Oh yes, and there is some work to be done too – the quest for advertising's Eldorado, the Coca-Cola account.
'e' is sometimes sleazy, sometimes scurrilous and always scabrously funny. It also contains a first-class joke about the Pope and sound advice on the maintenance of industrial carpet tiles.
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