Take a photo of a barcode or cover
bruceolivernewsome 's review for:
Scoop
by Evelyn Waugh
In the end, I keep coming back to Scoop as my favorite Waugh. Few satires can combine humor, complexity of story, and tragedy. Waugh combines them better than anybody other than perhaps Wodehouse at best. and Scoop is the Waugh at his best. You know you're starting something special given the immediate introduction to the first characters' captivating and outrageous yet credible posturing and dialogue. Then the story achieves a pace and complexity that allows it to forget its characters in England in order to take up new characters in Africa, then it circles back. Along the way, it gives you laugh-out-loud jokes, narrative surprises, memorable characters and catchphrases ("Up to a point, Lord Cooper"), and insightful satire of the ridiculous communist and fascist ideologies of his time (and our time now, unfortunately). The complexity alone probably wouldn't allow it to get published today, given how infantile, ephebophile, and ideologically reductionist publishers have become. Picking up Scoop again makes contemporary fiction look like high school pretensions. Of course, too many people in the comments on this page are ready to dismiss the book and Waugh generally as racist, sexist, and [insert fashionable ism of the moment], but the simplicism and convenience of such dismissal is easily refuted by noting that Waugh satirized everybody, and most of the characters he made to look ridiculous were upper middle class white Englanders like himself. The Africans he satirized deserved to be satirized, including, indirectly Emperor Haile Selassie, an incompetent, egotistical, slave-owning, ethnic minority leader and imperialist whom Waugh saw through from the beginning, even while almost all other Western journalists swallowed the propaganda that he was a Euro-centric liberal reformer. Ironically, every time today's critics fashionably fault Waugh for cultural relativism, you know Waugh is offering more reality than any of today's publications. Scoop succeeds on so many levels: satire, historical fiction, and even documentary. I doubt his fashionability will ever return, but that is the fault of our times, not his writing.