“I doubt you’ll enjoy it,” was Mr Booker Talk’s reaction as I embarked on reading Scoop by Evelyn Waugh for the Classics Club spin.
He was so right.
Published in 1938, Scoop was written at a time when Waugh was gaining a name as a satirical novelist. He wrote the novel as a critique of newspaper journalism, particularly its propensity to manufacture and sensationalise “news” in order to make it more entertaining.
Scoop follows the misadventures of William Boot, a gentle soul who lives with an odd concoction of relatives in the family’s crumbly manor house. He writes a regular nature column for the Beast, conveying in florid style the wonders of badgers and water voles.
As a result of mistaken identity, he becomes a foreign correspondent for the newspaper, despatched to Africa to report on a civil war in Ishmaelia. He’s hopelessly ill-prepared for such an assignment. He doesn’t know anything about Ishmaelia, why there is a war or who is fighting whom.
Media incompetence and sensationalism are a running theme of this novel. Waugh’s cast of foreign correspondents in Ishmaelia are cynical, lazy, and more interested in filing dramatic copy than understanding the actual situation on the ground. Their number one goal is to keep one step ahead of the competition, so stealing cables sent to their competitors’ cables and lying about anything they think will give them an advantage, is fair game.
Boot’s eyes are opened when a fellow journalist tells him about some Fleet Street legends.
… how Wenlock Jakes, highest-paid journalist of the United States, scooped the world with an eye-witness story of the sinking of the Lusitania four hours before she was hit; how Hitchcock, the English Jakes, straddling over his desk in London, had chronicled day by day the horrors of the Messina earthquake…
Waugh’s treatment of class and social mobility provides another opportunity for satire. William Boot’s accidental success as a war correspondent, despite his complete incompetence and naivety, serves as a commentary on how the upper classes stumble into positions of influence. In this world, connections, luck, and the ability to project confidence, count for more than expertise and ability.
Maybe in the 1930s, readers had a different idea of what is and isn’t funny because this novel was for me at best faintly amusing but nothing more.
True there are some delightfully rich characters The stand-outs for me were the megalomaniac press baron Lord Copper who has an over-inflated sense of his own importance and knowledge and the innocent-abroad William Booth who is completely out of his depth but somehow manages to beat the competition to a scoop.
I did enjoy his exchange of telegrams with the Beast news desk in London. There’s a note of escalating desperation in the messages they send Boot, urgently pressing him to send news — of any kind. To which Boot replies firstly:
“All rot about Bolshevik he is only ticket collector ass called Shumble thought his beard false but its perfectly all right really will cable again if there is any news very wet here yours William Boot. “
Even a telegram advising “hard news essential’ doesn’t do the trick. Boot simply replies: “raining hard hope all well England will cable again if any news.” He goes off to play ping pong while the entire media pack head to the front in search of stories.
I can imagine steam coming out of the ears of the news desk in London when they open those cables. Weather conditions in Africa are hardly the stuff of front page headlines.
Scoop was a mixed bag for me. Amusing enough to keep me reading though the humour was rather too gentle. I much prefer cutting edge wit.
Also I found Waugh’s representation of non-British characters uncomfortable. His African characters in particular were over-simplified and portrayed merely as simpletons and buffoons. Even accepting that patronising attitudes towards Africans were commonplace among Europeans in the 1930s, it still jarred.
Scoop was the book I landed as a result of the Classics Club #41 Spin. I’ve not had a good track record with these spins but amazingly I read this one ahead of the “deadline” of August 24.
I’m counting this as book number 6 in my #10booksofsummer reading project.
