Hallelujah ! (Jesus and the Adman - Rhidian Brook)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	Jesus and the Adman - Rhidian Brook
Date:	14/04/02 (357 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: a good read

Disadvantages: none

I’ve always been interested in advertising. I read Vance Packard’s ‘The Hidden Persuaders’ when I was still at school - as I’ve just found out by looking at the front page that was in 1964! (What did YOU read then? Heehee!)

In those days advertising was seen mainly as a threat to which everybody was exposed and could do nothing about. “Americans have become the most manipulated people outside the Iron Curtain.” Strong words.

Although the essence of advertising hasn’t changed - to make people spend money they probably don’t have on products they mostly don’t need by associating them with promises that will hardly be fulfilled - its image has radically changed over the years. People aren’t afraid of being manipulated any more, no, they even like it, advertising has become a lifestyle thingy and successful admen an envied species.

If I were to decide today which job to choose I might try to get into an advertising agency, I don’t consider myself untalented in this field. ;-) I’ve already won some first prizes in nation-wide competitions, nothing big, some watches, a fountain pen with a gold nib, but first prizes nevertheless. I got the latter for a slogan on a dairy product which translated into English is sounds like this:

“When they were in paradise,
Eve gave Adam apple rice.”

I think it’s obvious why I had to buy the book ‘Jesus and the Adman’!

Johnny Yell, 29, is a good copywriter, otherwise he wouldn’t work in the most prestigious advertising agency of the country, but he hasn’t reached the top rank yet. He’s ambitious and doesn’t mind cheating on his partner when he sees that the latter has come up with something brilliant. He just changes the order of words and punctuation and hands the sketch in to the boss taking the praise unashamedly; he knows that “without ideas
an adman is a dead man.”

The chance for his breakthrough comes when LifeGen, a life insurance agency, asks WWW, the firm Johnny works for, to come up with a nationwide poster campaign.

While the campaign is still at its embryonic stage, Johnny’s father dies. After the funeral he wanders back into the church where he sees a picture of a smiling Jesus which fascinates him at once despite his being a non-believer. “Maybe it was just a good painting, but something beyond pure aesthetics connected in him; he felt a gentle shiver coursing up his spine and tingling at his cortex. This Jesus looked like a man who had gone to the other side and come back, and the knowledge of that great secret could be detected in his smile like an excellent joke he could hardly wait to share.”

Johnny can hardly wait to share his idea with his boss to use this painting for the poster campaign for LifeGen together with the slogan ‘For Life after Death, talk to LifeGen’. He’s the first to hand in something, and as his idea is really an attention-grabber, his boss gives him the thumbs up.

The campaign is extremely successful, Johnny wins a prize and is promoted which means loads of money and a smashing company car.

I’ve read this part of the novel with great pleasure as it gives a good insight into the world of advertising. Rhidian Brook knows what he’s writing about being an adman himself. Not that that must mean he can write fiction well, too, but he can. His prose is fluent, his use of the language superb. He received the Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel (this being his second), a Betty Trask Award, the Author’s Club First Novel Award and he was short-listed for the Welsh Novel of the Year.

I’ve already read two German novels set in the world of advertising, they’re both satirical and after reading the first part (of three) of ‘Jesus and the Adman&
#8217; written in the same style I was led to assume that that’s the only possible one for the description of this world. But then things change dramatically. Johnny has a breakdown as the themes he’s played with so flippantly for his campaign start getting to him. What IS on the other side? What HAS Jesus seen? All the questions discussed in the dooyoo cat ‘Life after Death’ suddenly worry him.

I felt a bit cheated, I had wanted to read a funny book! But I can’t blame the author for my expectations, of course. He cleverly leads us into a serious story about conscience v. commercialism including the question of the Divine, all the while keeping up a light-handed tone.

The main part of the novel deals with Johnny’s attempt to come to terms with life after he’s glimpsed that there might be more to it than concocting slogans, rhyming and punning.

It’s a one-plot, one-idea novel, a quick read, only 194 pages; I’d recommend it as reading matter for a train ride, but wouldn’t leave it behind when getting off!

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