Scoop

Rating:
Summary: Funny, But Nothing Special
Review: "Scoop" breezes by effortlessly enough, but it results in a fairly inconsequential novel. Evelyn Waugh lampoons the media and journalistic society in this unadulterated comedy about the wrong man ending up in the wrong place at the right time. You can just picture the BBC doing a hilarious film version of this, with John Cleese in the role of the main character (perhaps there is a movie version already). It's a piffle of a book really, more worthy of P.G. Wodehouse than Evelyn Waugh. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but one looking for something with as much bite to it as, say, Waugh's "A Handful of Dust" will be disappointed. A fun but uninspired read.

Curiously, this was included on the MLA list of the 20th Century's 100 best novels. Since Waugh was already represented in two other spots (for "Dust" and "Brideshead Revisited") one wonders why they felt compelled to honor "Scoop" as well. Maybe I missed something.

Rating:
Summary: Funny, But Nothing Special
Review: "Scoop" breezes by effortlessly enough, but it results in a fairly inconsequential novel. Evelyn Waugh lampoons the media and journalistic society in this unadulterated comedy about the wrong man ending up in the wrong place at the right time. You can just picture the BBC doing a hilarious film version of this, with John Cleese in the role of the main character (perhaps there is a movie version already). It's a piffle of a book really, more worthy of P.G. Wodehouse than Evelyn Waugh. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but one looking for something with as much bite to it as, say, Waugh's "A Handful of Dust" will be disappointed. A fun but uninspired read.

Curiously, this was included on the MLA list of the 20th Century's 100 best novels. Since Waugh was already represented in two other spots (for "Dust" and "Brideshead Revisited") one wonders why they felt compelled to honor "Scoop" as well. Maybe I missed something.

Rating:
Summary: An appreciation of Evelyn Waugh's style.
Review: 'Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.' That must be good style.

Rating:
Summary: IN A WAUGH ZONE WITH THE WRONG BOOT
Review: .

This book is set just 54 years before CNN redefined the role of war correspondents during the Gulf War of 1990.

Back in the late 1930s just before WW2, the global powers were having a trial run ahead of the Big One. In those days, it was the newspapers (and not the TV networks) who called the shots.

Evelyn Waugh in his inimitable, over-the-top style goes right to the heart of the media business. It's not about delivering news; it's pure power politics. The egos of the media owner are the prime drivers of the machinations of this industry. Their bungling underlings are constantly in damage control and covering up their incompetencies.

Only Waugh could get away with these observations on indigenous Africa. His descriptions of the supposedly fictitious Democratic Republic in Africa (20 years before most of the continent went independent of their colonial masters) is pure clairvoyance.

Most of Africa today is just like his Ishmaelia. So-called democracies run by autocratic Presidents-for-Life.

This book as well as being a primer for foreign correspondents, is an excellent manual for students of African politics.

Unfortunately, for many readers on the West Side of the Atlantic, Waugh's subtle ironic style might be at times impenetrable. Rule one with Waugh is never to take things at face value. He was a brave and clever man to get away with the demolition jobs he does on his own class ridden British society.

Once you twig to his wit, his writing becomes a pure pleasure. There is never a dull moment. His observations on society, politics, business and the human condition are timeless.

Waugh is the master of 20th century satirical literary humour. Scoop is one of his best.

Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece of comic writing
Review: A lot of books complain about the world, but here's a book that knows that there's a difference between what actually goes on in the world and what gets reported as news, and that the news is only as good as the people that report it. Inspired by his own experience as a foreign correspondent, Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop" is partly a satire of journalism, partly a spy story with a well-crafted plot, and totally a masterpiece of comic writing.

Civil war is brewing in a fictitious African country called Ishmaelia. In England, a successful novelist named John Courteney Boot would like to be sent there as a foreign correspondent/spy, so he gets a friend to pull some strings with the owner of a London newspaper called the Beast, a paper which "stands for strong mutually antagonistic governments everywhere." The paper's owner, Lord Copper, has never heard of Boot, but accedes to the request and has his Foreign Editor, Mr. Salter, set up the engagement. Salter mistakenly taps John's less famous, less talented cousin William Boot, who writes a dippy nature column for the Beast, to be the foreign correspondent in Ishmaelia. So off William goes, a large assortment of emergency equipment for the tropics in tow, including a collapsible canoe.

When William gets to Ishmaelia, he encounters several journalists from newspapers all over the world who also are looking for the big scoop on the war. The problem is that nobody knows what's going on, as there is no palpable unrest, and the country's government is an institution of buffoonery. The events in Ishmaelia are reminiscent of the circus-like atmosphere of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22." While the rest of the journalists take off to the country's interior on a red herring, William stays behind in the capital and meets a man who is at the center of the country's political intrigue and lets William in on exclusive information. William manages to turn in the big story and becomes a journalistic hero back in England.

Lovers of good prose will find much to savor in "Scoop"; practically every sentence is a gem of dry British wit. Waugh is comparable with P.G. Wodehouse in his flair for comic invention, and indeed William Boot is a protagonist worthy of Wodehouse -- a hapless but likeable dim bulb who triumphs through dumb luck.

Rating:
Summary: Scoop
Review: A truly funny satire of the newspaper business. Waugh's wit, unlike other so called British humorists, is funny even to a colonial like me.

Through a wonderfully hilarious mistaken identity, William Boot is sent to Africa by the daily newspaper The Beast on rumors that the country of Ishmalea is on the verge of revolution. Waugh's portrayal of Lord Copper, the newspaper magnate, Lady Stitch, and Slater,the newspaper's foreign editor, is very funny.

Boot is the newspaper's reporter of farm news and is flabergasted at Cooper and Slater's insistence that he go to Ishmalea to cover the revolution. He reluctantly agrees to go only because of the opportunity it presents to fly in an airplane.

Upon arriving in Ishmalea, Boot is united with foreign correspondents of other European and American newspapers. He quickly discovers that there really is no news to report and that for the most part the other reporters are making thier own news. Most of the stories are genrated by the infamous Lord Hitchcock who rarely leaves his hotel room.

While in Ishmalea, Boot meets a mysterious German girl, who he falls madly in love with. Boot reports on a mini-revolution that lasts about a day. For his good work, Boot is recalled home to a hero's welcome by The Beast.

Boot desires to return to his agrarian lifestyle much to the dismay of Lord Cooper who sends Slater to the country to persuade Boot to stay on at the Beast and to attend a banquet in his honor. Slater's visit to the Boot homestead is truly hillarious.

In a wonderful irony John Boot, the novelist that Lord Cooper intended to send to Ishmalea, is knighted for his work at the bequest of Lord Cooper and then sent to Antartica as a foreign correspondent.

Rating:
Summary: A blend of P.G. Wodehouse and Art Buchwald.
Review: But not, I'm sorry to say, as entertaining as a romp with Bertie and Jeeves or as outrageous as a Buchwald column. The story centers on the wrong Mr. Boot, sent to darkest Africa by a London daily to cover a war that never quite happens. It's a fine opportunity for Waugh to skewer everyone in sight, and he does the job skillfully. Journalists, capitalists, communists, bureaucrats, and common folk--they're all grist for his mill. And the story moves along nicely, what with one mistaken identity and unforseen adventure after another. This must have been a good read and a shocking picture of how the world worked when it appeared in 1937. But we're now living in 1998. The shock value is gone, and the genre for which "Scoop" helped set the style has moved on. Read this book for mild amusement, but not for much else.

Rating:
Summary: Stop the presses
Review: Call William Boot the Forrest Gump of the 1930s: oblivious to the process he is a part of, he continually finds himself in the right place at the right time, blindly stumbling onto the Big Story that made him a reluctant hero.

In Scoop, Evelyn Waugh -- one of the most famous curmudgeons of English literature -- produces an enjoyable and easy-to-read satire that will recall the novels of P.G. Wodehouse and Graham Greene's lighter efforts. In the book, Mr. Waugh points his razor wit toward the media, royalty, politics, warfare, and travel, all in the context of a fictional and fanciful war in the made-up Republic of Ishmaelia that is based on Italy's ill-fated war in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), which Mr. Waugh himself covered as a young reporter.

His sharpest barbs are saved for his one-time profession, which he paints as being populated by lazy and back-stabbing prima donnas incapable of independent thought and more interested in style -- or at least the appearance of style -- than in substance. The bland Boot, the story's protagonist who is a decent enough fellow but a hopeless journalist, manages to get far closer to the truth than any of his colleagues but does so only by chance.

Though the attitudes, language, and practices described in Scoop are more than a little dated, there is an element of truth in the picture Mr. Waugh paints of the Fourth Estate (as sad cases like the contemporary one involving one-time New York Times rising star Jayson Blair remind us). The descriptions are, however, greatly exaggerated: it is impossible to imagine a time when writers were sent into the field so poorly prepared, with unlimited expense accounts, and rewarded for sending in cryptic messages that are somehow turned into massive front-page reports. There is a slight element of sour grapes in Mr. Waugh's description of the newsgathering field he failed to excel in, something most obvious from the names he chooses for the fictional newspapers in the story (The Daily Beast, The Daily Brute, etc.).

More importantly, like most popular satires, Scoop is really less about its subject matter than about comforting those who don't move in the same circles as the rich and powerful the book dismantles between its covers -- remember that these are the same people who were expected to buy this book when it was published in 1938. Even critics at that time recognized this in an as-a-matter-of-fact way, referring to Scoop as a comedy of errors Mr. Waugh dashed off to pay the bills between more weighty projects.

But the most serious flaw of the book concerns the way the main character, Boot, evolves ... or fails to evolve. Characters are the cornerstone of any great story and even with a farce like Scoop (compare Boot to the bumbling Wormold in Mr. Greene's Our Man in Havana, another satire produced by a serious writer on a lark) the story is dramatically improved by illustrating the evolution of characters over the length of the narrative. But in Scoop, Boot returns home just the same as when he left. All of the characters, in fact, fail to change at all during the course of the story, with the possible exception of the compelling and shadowy Russian/Hungarian/Pole cum German love interest, Kätchen -- not the best possible work from an author known for producing noteworthy personalities in his more noteworthy novels like Decline and Fall and Brideshead Revisited.

Rating:
Summary: One of the great novels of the 20th Century
Review: During his lifetime, Waugh was seldom considered a major writer, but since then his reputation has soared, especially among rightwingers. Among the people who consider him among the one or two greatest English-language novelists of the last century are Tom Stoppard (who ranks him with Nabokov), Tom Wolfe (who ranks him with D.H. Lawrence), and William F. Buckley. (Leftist John K. Galbraith thinks Waugh the finest prose stylist.)

For whatever it's worth, I'd agree with Stoppard's ranking of Waugh and Nabokov at the top. And, to my mind, "Scoop" is Waugh's best. It's not a grandiose book like "Brideshead Revisited" but for controlled artistry, it's right up there with Nabokov's "Pale Fire." -- Steve Sailer

Rating:
Summary: Lots of laugh !
Review: Evelyn Waugh signs, with "Scoop", quite a masterpiece in humour. He is able to create fun with the serious journalist job, giving to think about what those people are... Good to show that a person that does not know about a topic may be able to write about it, like one of the characters! Realist work, with a well-built plot - a good reading moment. Even the colonial gimmicks and allusions to the European totalitary regimes of the first half of XXth century are present... represented in a totally ironical way.