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I had been meaning to read this novel for many years, as its satirical truth-telling about journalism is legendary. Despite the almost 80 years that have passed since its first publication, a lot of what it has to say still rings true.
The plot centres around young William Boot, an impoverished young country gentleman who is happy living in his country manor writing a weekly nature column for London paper the Daily Beast. Thanks to a farcical opening act, the paper’s management mixes him up with his distant cousin John Boot, a fashionable novelist who is eager to be sent abroad as a foreign reporter, and a reluctant William is sent instead to a “promising little war” in the fictional African republic of Ishmaelia.
I found the opening, covering London society and Fleet Street proper, genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. I may even have snorted a few times. Waugh’s first-hand knowledge of having written for the Daily Mail means that this is truly observational humour, and it’s easy to recognise the journalistic traits being picked apart.
But I have to admit that as soon as the action moved to Africa I began to feel uncomfortable as it all started to read as a little bit (or possibly a lot) racist. It’s one thing to depict all Americans as bold and brash, or all Englishmen as snobs, but it’s quite another to make jokes about Africans being cannibals and idiots. Or is it? I did begin to question whether I was being too sensitive, and if actually Waugh’s savage humour was evenly handedly picking apart everyone in this novel. Plus of course, there’s a danger in judging older books by today’s standards, and ignoring the fact that language and understanding around issues such as race have moved on a lot.
- See my full review: http://www.noseinabook.co.uk/2016/04/03/it-was-a-wish-so-far-from-the-probabilities-of-life
The plot centres around young William Boot, an impoverished young country gentleman who is happy living in his country manor writing a weekly nature column for London paper the Daily Beast. Thanks to a farcical opening act, the paper’s management mixes him up with his distant cousin John Boot, a fashionable novelist who is eager to be sent abroad as a foreign reporter, and a reluctant William is sent instead to a “promising little war” in the fictional African republic of Ishmaelia.
I found the opening, covering London society and Fleet Street proper, genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. I may even have snorted a few times. Waugh’s first-hand knowledge of having written for the Daily Mail means that this is truly observational humour, and it’s easy to recognise the journalistic traits being picked apart.
But I have to admit that as soon as the action moved to Africa I began to feel uncomfortable as it all started to read as a little bit (or possibly a lot) racist. It’s one thing to depict all Americans as bold and brash, or all Englishmen as snobs, but it’s quite another to make jokes about Africans being cannibals and idiots. Or is it? I did begin to question whether I was being too sensitive, and if actually Waugh’s savage humour was evenly handedly picking apart everyone in this novel. Plus of course, there’s a danger in judging older books by today’s standards, and ignoring the fact that language and understanding around issues such as race have moved on a lot.
- See my full review: http://www.noseinabook.co.uk/2016/04/03/it-was-a-wish-so-far-from-the-probabilities-of-life
Scoop is a novel which for some reason I always thought came with an exclamation mark at the end (Scoop!) but I can now find no evidence to support this recollection. I also thought it was Waugh’s most famous novel, though I’ve now found out that he did in fact write Brideshead Revisited, a novel which I will definitely, one day, get around to finding out what it is about and why it is well-known and possibly even read it.
Scoop is one of those novels which is, somehow, simultaneously timeless but also an umistakeable product of its time. John Courtney Boot, a relatively successful writer, uses one of his wealthy patrons to insist that a media magnate signs him onto his newspaper (The Daily Beast, yes) as a foreign correspondent for the brewing civil war in the obscure African nation of Ishmaelia. The paper’s underlings are simply told to dispatch “Boot,” and check their existing staff list for the candidate, finding on the payroll a minor contributor named William Boot who writes a column called Lush Places. (I imagine these sorts of wistfully bucolic columns aimed at Londoners were quite popular at the time, but it immediately made me think of one of the only survivors, the Guardian’s long-running Country Diary.) Scoop is a fish-out-of-water comedy, as the naive and hapless William Boot is plucked from a life of genteel poverty in the West Country and dispatched alongside the cynical, ruthless journalists of the international press to a farcical civil war in a tinpot dictatorship.
Scoop is a dated product of the 1930s in the sense that it deals with a fairly quaint and predictably racist colonial setting and proxy war, but also in the sense that it was written as a satire of Fleet Street based on Waugh’s own experience covering the Italian invasion of Ethiopia for the Daily Mail (no less execrable in the 1930s than it is now, presumably), with characters very much based on real people. According to Wikipedia, Lord Copper is based on Lord Northcliffe and Lord Beaverbrook, William Boot is based on Bill Deedes, Wenlock Jakes is based on John Gunther of the Chicago Daily News and Mrs Stitch is based on Lady Diana Cooper. I haven’t the foggiest notion of who any of these people are, and I don’t mind admitting that, because I doubt the average well-educated Englishman would know either. Scoop is almost eighty years old; the figures it satirises may have been famous in their day, but they’ve long since become dust and ashes.
Fortunately Waugh’s general lampoonery of the habits of the press is in many ways still relevant today, but even if it weren’t, so what? We can still laugh at the habits and foibles of wholly fictional characters, and Waugh’s prose style is in itself wonderfully comic:
He gave the steward one of Nannie Bloggs’ sovereigns in mistake for a shilling. It was contemptuously refused and everyone in the carriage stared at him. A man in a bowler hat said, “May I look? Don’t often see one of them nowadays. Tell you what I’ll do, I’ll toss you for it. Call.”
William said, “Heads.”
“Tails it is,” said the man in the bowler hat, putting it in his waistcoat pocket. He then went on reading his paper and everyone stared harder at William. His spirits began to sink; the mood of defiance passed. It was always the way; the moment he left the confines of Boot Magna he found himself in a foreign and hostile world.
While Scoop doubtless would have been a more relevant novel in its heyday, it still has plenty of amusing observations about the nature of news – the indifference of its consumers, the cosy relationship between the press and the powerful, and its own distorting influence on the truth. It’s probably not going to be Waugh’s most enduring book, but it’s still worth a read in the 21st century.
Scoop is one of those novels which is, somehow, simultaneously timeless but also an umistakeable product of its time. John Courtney Boot, a relatively successful writer, uses one of his wealthy patrons to insist that a media magnate signs him onto his newspaper (The Daily Beast, yes) as a foreign correspondent for the brewing civil war in the obscure African nation of Ishmaelia. The paper’s underlings are simply told to dispatch “Boot,” and check their existing staff list for the candidate, finding on the payroll a minor contributor named William Boot who writes a column called Lush Places. (I imagine these sorts of wistfully bucolic columns aimed at Londoners were quite popular at the time, but it immediately made me think of one of the only survivors, the Guardian’s long-running Country Diary.) Scoop is a fish-out-of-water comedy, as the naive and hapless William Boot is plucked from a life of genteel poverty in the West Country and dispatched alongside the cynical, ruthless journalists of the international press to a farcical civil war in a tinpot dictatorship.
Scoop is a dated product of the 1930s in the sense that it deals with a fairly quaint and predictably racist colonial setting and proxy war, but also in the sense that it was written as a satire of Fleet Street based on Waugh’s own experience covering the Italian invasion of Ethiopia for the Daily Mail (no less execrable in the 1930s than it is now, presumably), with characters very much based on real people. According to Wikipedia, Lord Copper is based on Lord Northcliffe and Lord Beaverbrook, William Boot is based on Bill Deedes, Wenlock Jakes is based on John Gunther of the Chicago Daily News and Mrs Stitch is based on Lady Diana Cooper. I haven’t the foggiest notion of who any of these people are, and I don’t mind admitting that, because I doubt the average well-educated Englishman would know either. Scoop is almost eighty years old; the figures it satirises may have been famous in their day, but they’ve long since become dust and ashes.
Fortunately Waugh’s general lampoonery of the habits of the press is in many ways still relevant today, but even if it weren’t, so what? We can still laugh at the habits and foibles of wholly fictional characters, and Waugh’s prose style is in itself wonderfully comic:
He gave the steward one of Nannie Bloggs’ sovereigns in mistake for a shilling. It was contemptuously refused and everyone in the carriage stared at him. A man in a bowler hat said, “May I look? Don’t often see one of them nowadays. Tell you what I’ll do, I’ll toss you for it. Call.”
William said, “Heads.”
“Tails it is,” said the man in the bowler hat, putting it in his waistcoat pocket. He then went on reading his paper and everyone stared harder at William. His spirits began to sink; the mood of defiance passed. It was always the way; the moment he left the confines of Boot Magna he found himself in a foreign and hostile world.
While Scoop doubtless would have been a more relevant novel in its heyday, it still has plenty of amusing observations about the nature of news – the indifference of its consumers, the cosy relationship between the press and the powerful, and its own distorting influence on the truth. It’s probably not going to be Waugh’s most enduring book, but it’s still worth a read in the 21st century.
adventurous
funny
lighthearted
relaxing
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
A modern comedy of errors, Evelyn Waugh is the true master of satire. This book is a classic. If you like Wodehouse, you will love Evelyn Waugh.
A case of mistaken identity sees a retiring countryside columnist sent to report on revolutionary Ishmaelia. There, he's holed up with a gaggle of experienced reporters, all kept at arms' length from anything newsworthy. What follows is a hundred comedic footsteps into farce, and very good fun throughout.
So light-hearted is the prose, and so different the worlds of Boot and Waugh, that it's easy to forget this is critical satire. Unfortunately, some blatant racism rather lifts the veil and takes the sheen off.
So light-hearted is the prose, and so different the worlds of Boot and Waugh, that it's easy to forget this is critical satire. Unfortunately, some blatant racism rather lifts the veil and takes the sheen off.
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
tense
Loveable characters:
Complicated
This was the first physical novel I've read in a while and I missed the ability to hover over a word I didn't recognise or that I wasn't sure I knew all possible meanings of. As a novel, it is definitely dated with some of the terminology used no longer acceptable. The story itself is interesting, and amusing. However, I didn't really identify or engage with any of the characters so I didn't find myself finding opportunities to sit down and open the book ready to lose myself in the tale.
fairly enjoyable but not as good as waugh's other books. i sort of swept through this one, smiled over some of the absurdities and appreciated the relevance of the ironies scattered throughout the book to the current news cycle.
Over three quarters of this book was awful. I understand that this book was meant to be a comedy, so maybe it's because it was written so long ago that I found it so dull. At certain points it picked up (the climax of the story was long before the end of the novel), but for the most part the plot wasn't interesting and the characters seemed two dimensional. I could appreciate a few of the jokes (such as the journalists making up their stories, or Mr. Salter's responses to the questions of Lord Copper) but they didn't even cause me to breathe slightly louder through my nose in amusement, let alone laugh.