E (novel)
The cover of the 2007 edition
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| Author | Matt Beaumont |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | HarperCollins |
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Publication date
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2000, reiussed 2007 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback original) |
| Pages | 342 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 44484266 |
e (originally subtitled The Novel of Liars, Lunch and Lost Knickers) is a comic novel by Matt Beaumont first published in 2000. Written in the epistolary tradition, it consists entirely of e-mails written between the employees of an advertising agency and some of their business partners. Thus, the novel is a multiple-perspective narrative where events are seen through the eyes of various people working for the agency, from temp to CEO. e centres on corporate business structures, leadership, creativity, headhunting for and firing people to keep up appearances, work efficiency, business ethics, and all kinds of human weaknesses which stall progress by having employees waste their time and energy on unimportant things and which eventually prevent success.
Beaumont worked as a copywriter himself before embarking on a literary career, and e is his debut novel.
The setting of e is the very beginning of the new millennium inside the London office of Miller Shanks, a prominent (fictitious) international advertising agency. When the novel opens two major projects are under way: the shooting, on location in Mauritius, of a commercial for a porn channel; and preparations for a sales pitch, with Coca-Cola as the company's prospective client.
While the Coca-Cola advertising campaign is supposed to be kept confidential, David Crutton, the Chief Executive Officer, is astonishingly computer illiterate and inadvertently sends carbon copies of every single one of his e-mails to the Helsinki office of Miller Shanks. Simon Horne, the Creative Director, has stolen the "original" idea on which the Coca-Cola campaign is based from two recent college graduates who are looking for work and does not believe that the past will ever catch up with him. In the end it does, but although the campaign can be patched up in the last minute with the help of the Helsinki office, Coca-Cola finally decide not to award their advertising account to Miller Shanks after one of their female top level managers has watched a secretly filmed video on the Internet showing Horne in his office having sex with a ladyboy, uploaded thanks to the efforts of Liam O'Keefe, who filmed it all taking place, and his friend Brett Topowlski.
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