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: 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: A fun romp through the newspaper business
Review: Having come to Scoop right after reading a collection of Waugh's stories and within six months of reading Brideshead Revisited, I was rather surprised by this very funny book. It is nothing like Brideshead in that regard, much lighter in tone and content, and a quicker read. Compared to Charles Ryder's Schooldays, a collection of short stories from the '30s, it instilled a renewed belief in Waugh's literary powers in this reader. This is a novel revolving around mistaken identity and a failed revolution in an obscure African nation. Into this plot are thrown a number of colourful characters and hilarious situations that make for a completely enjoyable read. Don't expect anything deep here; this is more along the lines of a literary confection but one of high quality.

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: 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: Still funny
Review: I had forgotten how funny Evelyn Waugh was. These days he is getting canonized as a serious novelist and the critics look down on his farcical romps. I re-read rhis. remembering that it had seemed funny at the time, but wondering how funny something written in 1937 could be.
Its political incorrectness jars on me less than it did when I first read it fifty years ago. Non-white people are referred to by obsolete terms based on the color of their skins, but no racial group is held up as wiser or superior. All are skewered.

Rating:
Summary: genuinely and consistantly funny
Review: I throughly enjoyed Scoop. It isn't that this book is some sort of hallowed masterpiece nor one of those brilliant, brutal satires that summarizes the absurd actuality of a particular state of being or belief. No, Scoop is just, quite simply, pure fun. The story becomes rather obvious after a while, but 'obvious' not in a cliched or predictable manner, but in keeping within the consistant vein of Waugh's narrative voice here. Oh, sure, there are some still relevent statements made regarding the incompetence and petty biases of newspaper men and their dictatorial bosses and there is a clearly put case to be made about how newspapers are run by wealthy industrialists who use their ownership of the media to advance their own selfish agendas, but all of this ultimately falls by the wayside as we follow the adventures of Boot, a disinterested chronicler of seemingly important events he finds himself unable to even bother trying to understand.

This is a very good book, more like 4 and a half stars, rounded up, in this rare instance, just because it made me laugh out loud more than a few times. Enjoy--

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: A Satirical Tour de Force
Review: It's London in the 1930s and novelist John Boot thinks he'd be the best writer for a special correspondent's job in Ishmaelia, East Africa, where revolution is in the air. He very well may be, but no one will find out because the powers that be at the great London newspaper, "The Beast" (heated rival of "The Brute"), mistakenly send his distant cousin William Boot instead. Poor William, who works for the paper already and was perfectly happy sending in his two essays a month on "Lush Places," is pulled out of his comfortable country lifestyle and thrust toward a greatness so great he could only stumble upon it by accident.

"Scoop" is an unrelenting satire of the tabloid press of Waugh's day. While it's arguably the most clever and well structured of the six of his novels I have read, imagine how much funnier it would be today if the general public didn't know so much about how journalists (even at the most respectable, unjaundiced papers) gather their stories. William quickly learns how the Special Correspondents submit their "eyewitness accounts" of battle from cushy hotel rooms fifty miles from the fighting, how a telegram of ten words will get turned into three hundred and splashed on the front page. And if the paper isn't happy with one writer, they can't send another because the journey from England to Africa takes three weeks!

As he does in "Decline and Fall" and "A Handful of Dust," Waugh once again shows us an Englishman thrown into absurd circumstances beyond his control who won't or can't speak up to save himself the trouble. Where "Scoop" improves, or at least differs, from the earlier works, is that William Boot does speak up for himself and it still doesn't help. He's no fool, however, and at least ends up in a better place than several of Waugh's earlier protagonists.

It's probable that "Scoop" doesn't get read much by students anymore because of it's racist undertones (and epithets) and seemingly casual treatment of revolutions in post-colonial Africa. Racist or not, what Waugh is really doing is making fun of the human race in all its varied colors and idiosyncrasies. As always, he saves his most biting satire for his fellow English.

An extremely well constructed book, "Scoop" displays layer upon layer of absurd characters and situations that Waugh pulls expertly together in a most satisfying manner. I thought he had really outdone himself with "A Handful of Dust," but I find that "Scoop" is now my favorite. Enjoy!