The spin number in The Classics Club Spin is number …
11
Sadly this means that my pleadings for Jean Rhys or Vita Sackville West went unheard. Not to worry, at least I got one of the shorter books from my list of twenty.
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh was published in 1938 at a time when Waugh was already garnering praise as a satirical author.
The novel tells of the circulation battles of two rival newspapers, The Beast and The Brute, during a war in the fictional African country of Ishmaelia. William Boot — a timid nature writer — is mistakenly dispatched to Ishmaelia as a foreign correspondent for The Beast.
Waugh apparently based the book on his own experiences as a foreign correspondent — he covered the coronation of Haile Selassie in 1930, returning to Abyssinia in 1935 to cover Mussolini’s invasion for the Daily Mail newspaper.
Some of his fellow journalists didn’t feel he took the role very seriously, which probably explains why Scoop highlights the absurdities of competitive journalism.
Scoop was published to wide critical acclaim but not all readers were enthusiastic. Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily Express took particular umbrage. Waugh’s fictitious Daily Beast was believed to be a parody of the Express and his character of the press baron Lord Copper was a spoof of Beaverbrook. Waugh’s publisher wasn’t threatened with a law suit if they didn’t change the dust jacket to remove the masthead of the Daily Beast which bore a close resemblance to that of the Express.
This isn’t one of Waugh’s best known novels but The Guardian rated it highly enough to include it in its list of 100 best novels. According to The Guardian:
Scoop is the supreme novel of the 20th-century English newspaper world, fast, light, entertaining and lethal. Remarkably, it’s a satire revered among successive generations of British hacks, the breed so mercilessly skewered by Waugh, a one-time special correspondent for the Daily Mail. Even in the age of online journalism, with many old practices facing extinction, its insights into the British press remain sharp, pertinent and memorable.
My own encounters with Fleet Street journalists (admittedly some decades ago) caused eyes to roll on many occasions so I’m looking forward to discovering if my experience matched Waugh’s own.
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