| Product: |
E. (A Novel) - Matt Beaumont |
| Date: |
22.07.07 (239 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Very funny in many parts
Disadvantages: Slightly juvenile humour
There are some ideas so brilliantly simple that you wonder why no-one had thought of them before. Writing a book in the form of E-Mails was one such idea and with E-Mails now such a widespread form of communication, even more so than when “E” was first published in 2000, it seems such an obvious thing to do. You can always tell the strength of an idea by how many imitations it spawns and the release of “Who Moved My Blackberry?” five years on suggests the idea is still a popular one.
“E” follows an important month in the life of a London advertising agency, Miller Shanks. They are battling to come up with the ideas that will win them a huge contract to be in charge of the advertising for Coca-Cola in the UK. This is a contract that would make Miller Shanks a major player, although they still need to keep up with their current business. This involves coming up with adverts for Mako Cars and Freedom Catalogues, as well as shooting an advert for the LOVE Adult Channel, featuring many topless women on the island of Mauritius.
Starting with the new Millennium, we are introduced to both the main characters and the advertising industry quite early on, thanks to their E-Mails. We meet the “lads” in the office, Brett, Liam and Vince, who have no morals, no secrets and no shame. The morals are made up for by Pinki, who comes across as a modern day hippy with well formed ideals objecting to pretty much any product or company that Miller Shanks represents.
There is also the CEO, David Crutton, who is determined that everyone will take the blame for whatever goes wrong but him, and there’s plenty of blame to be apportioned. There is Simon Horne, who gets by on stealing everyone else’s ideas and passing them off as his own and Daniel Westbrooke, who thinks he is more important than he is. Not to mention the secretarial staff who don’t need looks that kill as they’re more than happy to do it in hand to hand combat.
We follow the first vital month of the millennium at Miller Shanks through their E-Mails; both personal and business; to their mates in the office and to superiors; work related and otherwise. It is obvious quite early on that Miller Shanks operates an office that works on the principles enshrined in Murphy’s Law; usually, anything that can go wrong already did.
For anyone who works in an office, many of the things that happen at Miller Shanks will be things you’ll recognise. Things like other people, usually managers, taking the credit for your work, managers getting upset when things go wrong, clients taking their business elsewhere and secretaries trying to kill each other. You’ll also recognise some of the language that colleagues use to each other and certain people’s habits of signing E-Mails the same way and over using exclamation marks.
If you’ve ever worked in advertising, you’ll probably recognise a lot more than this; some of the events themselves will probably seem familiar. For those who don’t, there is at least a slight explanation as to how the standard advertising office should work given to a new member of staff. Whilst the character is clearly only there for this reason, it did give me all the information I really needed to know to not feel left behind when the characters were actually talking about the work they do; not that this happened terribly often.
Once this is out of the way, what you end up with is something ridiculously funny. Admittedly, it’s mostly quite juvenile humour in parts, something that teenage boys would snigger at, or the lads would find hilarious after a couple of drinks. These would be the main target groups for the book, I would imagine, but there is just about enough here for the book to provide amusement to anyone outside these groups. If you’ve ever worked in an office, regardless of your gender, you’ll recognise some of the behaviours and mishaps here and more than likely be amused by them, as I was.
The style helps make “E” as enjoyable as it is, as the way it is presented in terms of E-Mails, most of which are very short, means we’re dashing from one mishap to another very quickly. There aren’t any events or characters that take up enough space all at once, so you don’t tend to get bored of them. It helps that the characters are well enough drawn that you can start to like or hate some of them. Although they’re really a bit too laddish for my tastes, I do think it would be a laugh going out for a drink with Liam, Brett and Vince and I’m not sure I would find myself with anything in common with Pinki.
This is a very readable book, largely thanks to the style it’s written in. The individual E-Mails are generally quite short, which encourages you to read the next one and the next and they rush past you without even noticing how many you’ve read. It helps that with some of them being the people who would write advertising slogans, many of them have an entertaining turn of phrase which means there are a number of good lines appearing from out of nowhere to surprise you into laughter. This also means that it’s a book that can be read more than once, as I keep spotting funny moments that I’d either forgotten or missed the first time around, as they can all get buried in together.
You will require some suspension of disbelief to fully enjoy this as, while I can believe that all of these incidents may have happened at some point in Beaumont’s advertising career, they couldn’t possibly have occurred in such a short space of time. For me, however, this proved quite easy, as the style lends itself to not taking the book too seriously and once I’d started getting into it, I was more concerned with what stupid thing was going to happen next, rather than worrying about how real it all was.
I’m such a big fan of this book, I actually bought it twice; paying around £5.99 for my original copy and replacing that for 80 pence from a charity shop after I lent that to someone who never returned it. Even now, several years and many reads later, I wouldn’t begrudge paying £5.59 from Amazon, but with copies from a penny in the Amazon Marketplace and from 99 pence on eBay, suddenly this is a book that becomes incredibly good value for the amusement it provides to any fan of slightly juvenile humour.
Summary: The first and best novel written in E-Mail form.
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