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Title: Scoop by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0-316-92610-8 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.43 (35 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A masterpiece of comic writing
Comment: 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: 3
Summary: Funny, But Nothing Special
Comment: "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: 3
Summary: Half Scoop at best
Comment: 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."
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Title: A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0316926051 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0316926078 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0316917338 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 15 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0316926116 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh ISBN: 0316926345 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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