What do you think?
Rate this book
Ilium
How far would you go to climb the corporate ladder? How far could you fall?
Frank Donnelly and Jim Collins are newcomers at Ilium Electric, where dreams are made and shattered in equal measure. It’s the late 60s, and Ilium is in a position to shape the future of the American Dream. Where do Donnelly—a former fire marshal—and Collins—an ex-cop—fit in?
Naturally, at the bottom of the barrel.
While chasing an assignment that could only be handed down to the lowest of the low on Ilium’s totem pole, these two men come across a project that could work wonders for their new company, and their place within it. Sure, a mobile electric chair—an “Electrified Comfort Chair”—might seem dangerous, with an extremely limited clientele at first, but that’s where Donnelly and Collins come in.
Their job is sell the product. To their bosses, and to the public.
When tragedy strikes at the first public unveiling of this new luxurious piece of new-age comfort, however, things get more complicated. How can you sell a product that can kill so easily? Especially when no one knows how it happened, or whom to blame?
This is the job that Donnelly and Collins didn’t know they signed up for. This is corporate America.
This is ILIUM.
Frank Donnelly and Jim Collins are newcomers at Ilium Electric, where dreams are made and shattered in equal measure. It’s the late 60s, and Ilium is in a position to shape the future of the American Dream. Where do Donnelly—a former fire marshal—and Collins—an ex-cop—fit in?
Naturally, at the bottom of the barrel.
While chasing an assignment that could only be handed down to the lowest of the low on Ilium’s totem pole, these two men come across a project that could work wonders for their new company, and their place within it. Sure, a mobile electric chair—an “Electrified Comfort Chair”—might seem dangerous, with an extremely limited clientele at first, but that’s where Donnelly and Collins come in.
Their job is sell the product. To their bosses, and to the public.
When tragedy strikes at the first public unveiling of this new luxurious piece of new-age comfort, however, things get more complicated. How can you sell a product that can kill so easily? Especially when no one knows how it happened, or whom to blame?
This is the job that Donnelly and Collins didn’t know they signed up for. This is corporate America.
This is ILIUM.
375 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 6, 2015
4 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 8, 2015
Recent pop culture has been enamored with the American cultural landscape of the late 1960s. We’ve become fascinated by the hard drinking, chain-smoking, and womanizing rampant in corporate America in that era—an old-boy culture hanging onto traditional ideas about gender, race, social issues even as the cracks in the foundation were starting to expand, just before Everything changed. It’s the Mad Men effect, and one of the reasons this era seems to have taken hold of our collective consciousness is because the flux and divisions of that time and place mirror the rapid changes and social divisions present in our current society. If we can look back to the time before Everything changed, maybe it’s possible to understand where we went wrong and how to fix the present day.
At least that seems to be the root of the questions driving Ilium, a drama chock full of corporate plotting, figurative backstabbing, literal electrocution, illicit affairs, social unrest, and so very much boozing. Beyond all the dramatic intrigue, though, this is a darkly satirical novel, reminiscent of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities or Christopher Buckley’s Thank You For Smoking, both set in deeply cynical versions of the time periods in which they’re set. Ilium takes that cynicism in a somewhat unusual direction. The concept of a dystopian future is a staple of satirical fiction, but Ilium alters the timeline of American history to create a profoundly dystopian, but very plausible, version of the past.
In the first chapter of the novel, President Richard Nixon is the victim of a near-successful assassination attempt. It’s true that a number of plots against Nixon were foiled before ever really getting off the ground, but in Ilium’s America, the bullet makes contact and sends the nation—already battered by the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—into a state of hysteria. What follows is a period of partisan bickering in government and society that looks eerily familiar to anyone who has watched cable news for more than ten minutes.
And it’s in this landscape that Frank Donnelly and Jim Collins start work in the advertising division of Ilium Electric, a corporate behemoth that has the cultural and political sway to influence all dimensions of American daily life. Donnelly and Collins channel that sway into the marketing of a portable electric chair that has the potential to reshape the judicial system, public and private education, home life, and even the entertainment industry. Even though Donnelly and Collins are presented as the good guys in this world—and compared to pretty much everyone around them, they absolutely are— it’s a stark illustration of how corrupt the powers that be really are. Donnelly’s and Collins’s machinations show how much influence a single invention, a single corporation, and the vision of a tiny group of people can have on every aspect of our lives. It’s a profoundly compelling story that will keep your mind reeling with questions about how much we are shaped by the people who want to sell us something, whether it’s a product or an idea.
That’s what’s interesting about Donnelly and Collins—we’re rooting for them because they seem to be underdogs in the corporate world. In a sense they are, but it becomes apparent that they’re as driven by the desire to close the sale as anyone around them. Their moral flexibility becomes most apparent in their personal lives. As in business, both men conduct their personal affairs with more integrity than their peers, but their relationships with women remain very much a product of their time and place. There’s a love story of sorts that emerges from this, but because of their general attitudes toward women, for me the romantic angle never picked up the kind of momentum that I felt with the corporate intrigue, although both of these plotlines ultimately do weave together in the final chapters. Even so, the personal lives of Donnelly and Collins—and their eventual partners—drive home the fact that ultimately the people of Ilium are sharks, but they’re certainly fun to swim with for a few hundred pages.
At least that seems to be the root of the questions driving Ilium, a drama chock full of corporate plotting, figurative backstabbing, literal electrocution, illicit affairs, social unrest, and so very much boozing. Beyond all the dramatic intrigue, though, this is a darkly satirical novel, reminiscent of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities or Christopher Buckley’s Thank You For Smoking, both set in deeply cynical versions of the time periods in which they’re set. Ilium takes that cynicism in a somewhat unusual direction. The concept of a dystopian future is a staple of satirical fiction, but Ilium alters the timeline of American history to create a profoundly dystopian, but very plausible, version of the past.
In the first chapter of the novel, President Richard Nixon is the victim of a near-successful assassination attempt. It’s true that a number of plots against Nixon were foiled before ever really getting off the ground, but in Ilium’s America, the bullet makes contact and sends the nation—already battered by the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—into a state of hysteria. What follows is a period of partisan bickering in government and society that looks eerily familiar to anyone who has watched cable news for more than ten minutes.
And it’s in this landscape that Frank Donnelly and Jim Collins start work in the advertising division of Ilium Electric, a corporate behemoth that has the cultural and political sway to influence all dimensions of American daily life. Donnelly and Collins channel that sway into the marketing of a portable electric chair that has the potential to reshape the judicial system, public and private education, home life, and even the entertainment industry. Even though Donnelly and Collins are presented as the good guys in this world—and compared to pretty much everyone around them, they absolutely are— it’s a stark illustration of how corrupt the powers that be really are. Donnelly’s and Collins’s machinations show how much influence a single invention, a single corporation, and the vision of a tiny group of people can have on every aspect of our lives. It’s a profoundly compelling story that will keep your mind reeling with questions about how much we are shaped by the people who want to sell us something, whether it’s a product or an idea.
That’s what’s interesting about Donnelly and Collins—we’re rooting for them because they seem to be underdogs in the corporate world. In a sense they are, but it becomes apparent that they’re as driven by the desire to close the sale as anyone around them. Their moral flexibility becomes most apparent in their personal lives. As in business, both men conduct their personal affairs with more integrity than their peers, but their relationships with women remain very much a product of their time and place. There’s a love story of sorts that emerges from this, but because of their general attitudes toward women, for me the romantic angle never picked up the kind of momentum that I felt with the corporate intrigue, although both of these plotlines ultimately do weave together in the final chapters. Even so, the personal lives of Donnelly and Collins—and their eventual partners—drive home the fact that ultimately the people of Ilium are sharks, but they’re certainly fun to swim with for a few hundred pages.
Displaying 1 of 1 review