Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
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Book Reviews of Scoop
Book Review: Not Just a Cautionary Book for Aspiring Journalists
Summary: 4 Stars
This is not Waugh doing Waugh so much as it is Waugh doing Wodehouse (the Jeeves the Butler author). Shows you what Waugh is like when he's actually nice to his characters. Chirpingly silly, this one was written for the masses, not for Those Who Understand - this ain't no "Brideshead." But it's still devilishly clever and entertaining - "B" Waugh perhaps, but still better than the "A" work of a lot of other authors.Book Review: Pleasant Surprise!
Summary: 4 Stars
I didn't know what to expect when I began Scoop, but I very much enjoyed the book! This book gives a funny insight to the news business back when cell phones and satellite feeds were non-existent. This is a classic tale of mistaken identity!Book Review: One of the greatest books
Summary: 4 Stars
This is one of those book that you can't put down. Evelyn Waugh is one of the great writers of all time. His way with word is truly brilliant. This book is a must read and a must buy.Book Review: Too Broad a Farce
Summary: 3 Stars
I'm generally a fan of acerbic British fiction and satire, but haven't taken the time to go back and read any Waugh until I picked up this longtime talisman of foreign correspondents. The story concerns the efforts of rival newspapers to "scoop" each other with regards to a possible war in the fictional East African Republic of Ishmaelia (which appears to be a kind of mashup of Ethiopia and Liberia). The central player in this satire is an impoverished member of the rural gentry named Boot, who pens a soporific "Rural Notes" column for a London paper called The Daily Beast. The book starts in London, where a charismatic society lady arranges to have one her proteges, an up and coming young novelist also with the surname Boot, sent to Ishmaelia by the Beast as a special correspondent (with a commensurately special salary). Alas, through a mixup worthy of P. G. Wodehouse, the paper ends up sending the other Boot, who would prefer to be left to rot in peace in the country, but can't turn down the large salary on offer. This first part of the book is a lot of fun, with lots of great comedy, a wonderfully funny country household, and the society lady, who completely runs away with the show.
Alas, she disappears from the narrative as the wrong Boot heads off by planes, trains, and automobiles to Ishmaelia. From this point on, the story is intent mainly on skewering the news business at every turn, along with businessmen, politicians, innkeepers, and pretty much any one else who comes into contact with the hapless Boot. Some readers may find the portrayal of the Africans to be offensive, although to my mind, they don't come off any worse than the European characters, and if anything, seem a great more clever. Unfortunately, like a lot of comic writing based on exaggerated behavior, the book reads a little too much like slapstick for my taste, than it does nuanced satire. Of course, humor is often a matter of taste, so others may find it vastly more amusing.
On the whole, it's a book that would benefit from a nice ten page introduction to give it some context. For example, the reason Waugh is able to paint these preposterous portraits of foreign correspondents is that he was one himself. Like the first Boot in the book, he was a shiny young novelist whose lifestyle demanded a larger income stream, one which the newspapers could provide. Several times, Waugh held his nose and traveled as a foreign corresponded for the Daily Mail, despite being an apparently indifferent journalist who thought the profession mere hackery. In that context, this book might be interpreted as a work of self-loathing, in which he pillories himself -- since, by all accounts, he really indulged in all the worst behaviors that he satirizes in the novel. In fact, he had a kind of formula, whereby he would get paid to go on a trip as a correspondent, then milk that experience for both a non-fiction travelogue and a work of fiction. His first trip to Ethiopia was the impetus for his earlier novel Black Mischief, while a trip in 1938 to cover the Italian invasion led to a widely panned travelogue called Waugh in Abyssinia and this book.
On the whole, if you like comic fiction it's worth the brief time it takes to read, if only for the opening and some great deadpan stuff throughout. Especially amusing are the cryptic telegrams Boot gets from the head office. But on the whole, it struck me more as a broad farce than a surgical satire, and thus was a little disappointing.
Book Review: Half Scoop at best
Summary: 3 Stars
Having just read Waugh's "Sword Of Honour" and being familiar with his novelistic satire in "The Loved One," I expected more from Waugh than I got from "Scoop." Was he at fault, or me? It's clear he was writing a lark here, something dashed off between more substantial works. Maybe I shouldn't have expected more. But given his abiding interest in politics, travel, and social mores, I thought "Scoop" a desultory endeavor from someone who could have delivered much more.His analysis of the newspaper trade is seen as pungent and jabbing by some, but it comes off as forced and fantastical. Was there ever a newspaper that sent off reporters with unlimited expense accounts, allowing them to buy hollowed out sticks and collapsible canoes on a lark? Rewrite desks transform barely-coherent telegrams from lazy, drunken scribes into five-column front page articles, while editors gleefully tear apart their front pages at the 11th and one-half hour to accommodate dispatches from their reporters the darkest corners of the Third World. Yes, barroom journalism is still practiced occasionally by the likes of Jayson Blair, but if life was ever really this good in the Fourth Estate, there wouldn't be so many ulcers in newsrooms. Even in the 1930s, reporters worked harder than this, and Waugh knew it. The shame is the real work of journalists can be made every bit as silly and tawdry within the realm of true parody, but Waugh opted to pretend they only could be bothered to leave their hotel rooms to yell at their servants that the ice on their head compresses needed refreshing.
Waugh can write, he crafts amazing sentences, and he is capable of developing some probing lines of analysis around his myriad of characters. The middle part of this book is pretty good, not great but energetic, but it takes 100 pages to get there, and 50 more pages of denouement after its over to find out how everyone turned out. The lead character, the rustic rube William Boot, is no different upon leaving the strange country of Ishmaelia than before arriving, except for being taken for a bit of a ride by a shadowy German woman in one of several subplots that taper off into nothingness before the 321 pages run out. Boot seems a tribute to the complacency of the landed class, and like Waugh's ethnic epithets at the natives and others sprinkled liberally in the book, this leaves an unnecessarily sour taste. Waugh had a narrow perspective at times, but as a writer was usually more reflective, and less reflexive, than this.
Even the main business of the novel, Boot's big story that gives the book its name, is handled perfunctorily. It's neither great comedy or very dramatic. From what I gathered, the revolution was snuffed out in less than half a page when some angry Swede bulled through a porch of pinko grandees. Please tell me if I missed something here, but I don't think so.
"News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read," Boot is told by a companion, Corker, who makes a brief turn in the narrative before melting away like so many others in this maddeningly inconsistent book. It's a funny line, but it doesn't hold up to any deeper analysis. Nor, sorry to say, does "Scoop."