Monday, June 16

The Book, The Film, The T-Shirt - Matt Beaumont

An ad director keen to create something spectacular and original, a tyre manufacturer keep to add his own imprint, a pregnant wife who talks with her unborn child (who talks back), a PA worth her weight in gold, two MIA creative geniuses who hold an ad company's future int heir hands, a respected US soap starlet with a hidden past, an actor transitioning from day time drama to Hollywood stardom, two entourages of ever-increasing size, and a production steadily moving out of control...
Told sequentially from the points of view of all these players (and another half dozen or so), The Book, The Film... combines several plots (is Joe really that small, and who told the press? Where are Paul and Shaun? What's Veronica's last name? Will Carrie catch Greg out? How stupid is Tish, really?) with the steady conversion of an original ad into dross through the simple process of too many cooks.
I liked the premise of the book, and really liked the original ad script. But the delivery was too bitty, the number of small world coincidences strained credulity, few of the characters were pleasant or easy to relate to (one of the risks of such a large cast and small snippets), and it just wasn't that interesting or sparkling - quite possibly because I've read too much of the great Brookmyre recently. - Alex

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