Scoop (Cover to Cover Audio Books)

Rating:
Summary: Half Scoop at best
Review: 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."

Rating:
Summary: Waugh's Comic Assault on Wartime Journalism
Review: In October 1935, Italy invaded the independent African nation of Ethiopia. The Italo-Ethiopian War lasted less than eight months, Emperor Haile Selassie's kingdom falling quickly before Italy's modern weaponry. It was a little war that, nonetheless, implicated the great powers of Europe and foreshadowed the much bigger war to follow.

Evelyn Waugh was in his early 30s, already the author of four remarkable comic novels, when he accepted an assignment to cover the Italo-Ethiopian War for a London newspaper. The enduring result of that assignment was Waugh's fifth novel, "Scoop," a scathing satirical assault on the ethos of Fleet Street and its war correspondents, as well as on Waugh's usual suspects, the British upper classes.

The time is the 1930s. There is a civil war in the obscure country of Ishmaelia and Lord Copper, the publisher of the Beast newspaper, a newspaper that "stands for strong, mutually antagonistic governments everywhere," believes coverage of the war is imperative:

"I am in consultation with my editors on the subject. We think it a very promising little war. A microcosm you might say of world drama. We propose to give it fullest publicity. We shall have our naval, military and air experts, our squad of photographers, our colour reporters, covering the war from every angle and on every front."

Through the influence of Mrs. Algernon Stitch, Lord Copper soon identifies John Courteney Booth, a best selling popular author, as the right man to cover the war in Ishmaelia. Neither Lord Copper nor his inscrutable editorial staff, however, is especially well read or familiar with the current socially respectable literati. Amidst the confusion, Mr. Salter, the foreign editor, mistakenly identifies William Booth, country bumpkin and staff writer for the Beast, as the "Booth" to whom Lord Copper was referring:

"At the back of the paper, ignominiously sandwiched between Pip and Pop, the Bedtime Pets, and the recipe for a dish named 'Waffle Scramble,' lay the bi-weekly column devoted to nature: --

Lush Places. Edited by William Boot, Countryman.

" 'Do you suppose that's the right one?' "

" 'Sure of it. The Prime Minister is nuts on rural England.' "

" 'He's supposed to have a particularly high-class style: 'Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole' . . . would that be it?' "

" 'Yes,' said the Managing Editor. That must be good style. At least it doesn't sound like anything else to me.' "

Thus, William Boot, Countryman, soon finds himself on his way to Ishmaelia to cover the civil war for the Beast. Boot hooks up with an experienced wire reporter named Corker along the way. Corker teachers Boot the ins and outs of covering the war, a war in which reportage comes from little more than the imagination of the journalists sent to cover it and the editorial policies of their papers. The real nature of the war correspondent's profession is suggested when Boot and Corker go to the Ishmaelia Press Bureau to obtain their credentials: "Dr. Benito, the director, was away but his clerk entered their names in his ledger and gave them cards of identity. They were small orange documents, originally printed for the registration of prostitutes. The space for thumb-print was now filled with a passport photograph and at the head the word 'journalist' substituted in neat Ishmaelite characters."

Boot, despite his naivety and ignorance of the war correspondent's trade, inadvertently succeeds in trumping his more experienced journalistic competitors in reporting the war. Along the way, his adventures in Ishmaelia provide the perfect Waugh vehicle for a satiric dissection of the journalistic trade and of what passes as governance in the less developed parts of the world, where tribalism and nepotism more often than not underlie the veneer of ostensibly functioning political systems.

Boot, of course, returns to England, where he is now a household name. But one Boot is just as good as another, or so it seems. In the confusion of Boots, William, the real war correspondent, thankfully returns to his country home while his doddering, half-senile Uncle Theodore fulfills his role as the center of attention at the Beast and the prominent author John Courteney Booth (the man who started all this) mistakenly ends up with a knighthood intended for William.

"Scoop" is another brilliant Waugh comic send-up based on real-life experience, in this case his experience as a war correspondent in Ethiopia. It also is one of his best works, a little comic novel that will keep you in stitches from beginning to end.

Rating:
Summary: read The Loved One too
Review: John Courteney Boot is a rising young British novelist, but after an affair gone sour he wants to get out of England for awhile. He approaches the well-connected Mrs. Algernon Stitch for assistance & she in turn recommends to Lord Copper, publisher of the Beast newspaper, that he send Boot to cover the war in Ishmaelia, Africa. Copper in turn orders Mr. Salter, his Foreign Editor, to get Boot and in short order a series of mix-ups leads to the Beast sending William Boot, their nature columnist and a man who loathes leaving his ancestral home, Boot Magna Hall, to Africa. In Ishmaelia, Boot stumbles into a couple of scoops and returns home a hero, "Boot of the Beast".

Evelyn Waugh is one of the great satirists of the century and he has never been funnier than he is here, skewering the Press.

GRADE: B+