Scoop : a novel about journalists

by Evelyn Waugh

Other authorsJohn Holder (Illustrator)
Hardcover, 1999

Status

Available

Publication

London : The Folio Society, 1999.

Description

Lord Copper, newspaper magnate and proprietor of the "Daily Beast, " has always prided himself on his intuitive flair for spotting ace reporters. That is not to say he has not made the odd blunder, however, and may in a moment of weakness make another. Acting on a dinner party tip from Mrs. Algernon Stitch, Lord Copper feels convinced that he has hit on just the chap to cover a promising war in the African Republic of Ishmaelia. So begins "Scoop, "Waugh's exuberant comedy of mistaken identity and brilliantly irreverent satire of the hectic pursuit of hot news.

User reviews

LibraryThing member Greatrakes
This book has long been a favourite of mine. It is often described as a satire on journalists and press magnates, but it's really more wide-ranging. It is set in the world of the foreign corespondent, in the few years before the outbreak of the World War II.

The hero is William Boot, a young man,
Show More
the head of the ramshackle Boot family, who's family seat, Boot Magna Hall, is as decayed and improvised as any seat could be. He lives a blameless life, his main aim is to keep his small salary as the writer of Lush Places a nature column, published weekly in the Daily Beast, so that he can live quietly. A mix up occurs and he finds himself Foreign Correspondent for the Daily Beast in Ishmaelia, an African country that is a composite of Abyssinia, Liberia and others, to cover an uprising.

The press core, a fine collection of grotesques, fire off five word telegrams and the newspapers cover three pages with 'colour', no one can find the uprising, the Fleet Street legends find themselves comfortable holes and try and make the news, the rest whinge, bicker and get drunk. In Ishmaelia, Boot finds love, and loses it, he loses a wagon-load of gear (including a huge bundle of cleft sticks) and finds it, but on the whole, he survives better than the than the rest of the journalists. The world of Ishmaelia is one of corruption, nepotism and pretence (the second largest town on the map doesn't actually exist and everyone who gets sent to it ends up eaten.) The natives are barbarous, venal, stupid and lazy, the ruling, extended, Jackson family is eccentric, and corrupt.

The key to Williams survival, is his background at Boot Magna Hall. Waugh's description of Africa and Africans is no more withering than his description of the inhabitants of this decayed outpost of the rural ruling class, in England. An impoverished sprawling family, variously mad, bad, stupid and venal, whose decrepit and lazy servants spend more time looking after each other than they do the family, and whose farm workers make the cast of Deliverance look well bred. The visit of Mr Salter to the Hall, a suburbanite amongst the savages, is my favourite bit of the book.

"...at every station there had been a bustle of passengers succeeded by a long,
silent pause, before it started again; men had entered who, instead of slinking
and shuffling and wriggling themselves into corners and decently screening
themselves behind newspapers, as civilized people should when they travelled by
train, had sat down squarely quite close to Mr Salter, rested their hands on
their knees, stared at him fixedly and uncritically and suddenly addressed him
on the subject of the weather in barely intelligible accents; there had been
very old, unhygienic men and women, such as you never saw in the Underground,
who ought long ago to have been put away in some public institution; there had
been women carrying a multitude of atrocious little baskets and parcels which
they piled on the seats; one of them had put a hamper containing a live turkey
under Mr Salter's feet. It had been a horrible journey."


The book is beautifully crafted and very funny. I think it is genuinely a serious satire, Waugh's characters lead lives of drudgery, misery and failure. His characters who have attained worldly success are pathological and self-deluding, in his books he chronicles human despair and hopelessness, I must re-read more Waugh.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Dorritt
Am slowly working my way through the Waugh canon but wish it hadn't taken me so long to get around to Scoop. Finished the book a couple of days ago and I'm still smiling over the final 15 pages.

In this outing Waugh takes a break from heavy social commentary (war, politics, social mores) to take on
Show More
a much broader mark: the fourth estate. Unrest is brewing in the African country of Ishmaelia; British tabloids scamble to deploy their best foreign correspondents to cover the efray. Alas, through a series of blunders and misunderstandings, the Beast ends up deploying the author of their "pastoral living" column. Regular readers of Waugh will recognize William Bolt's type: steadfast and unflappable in the face of mounting chaos. Thrust into the heart of a forgotten African country, surrounded by a cast of socially/ethically/intellectually compromised foreign correspondents, and laden with an entire train-car full of wholly ridiculous luggage (including a "rather overfurnished tent, three months' rations, a collapsible canoe, a jointed flagstaff and Union Jack, and hand-pump and sterilizing plant, an astrolabe, six suites of tropical linen and a sou'wester, a camp operating table and set of surgical instruments, a portable humidor, and a Christmas hamper complete with a Santa Claus costume and a tripod mistletoe stand"), Bolt weathers a series of increasingly absurd predictaments without ever compromising his dignity.

There's not much subtlety here: the majority of characters are little more than grotesques and much of the humor is broad farce. But it's extraordinarily witty and hugely amusing farce: I laughed aloud so often, people actually began to move away from me on the metro. (A added boon during rush hour!)

Yes, Waugh's treatment of Africans is racist and irreverent - but then again, so is his treatment of his fellow countrymen, so critical reviewers might consider lightening up. The racism is no more than an honest representation of the paternalistic attitude of Britain towards "uncivilized lands" at this time in history; and, besides, all's fair in love, war, and satire.

Scoop is brisk, broad, and fun, fun, fun! Definitely a book I'll be picking up again one day.
Show Less
LibraryThing member arubabookwoman
This book starts laugh-out-loud funny, as through a series of misunderstandings and blunders a mild-mannered nature columnist is sent by a newspaper to be its ace reporter covering a bloody civil war in Africa. It's also kind of funny at the end, as the nature reporter seeks to avoid the limelight,
Show More
and the newspaper seeks to honor him with a banquet and a knighthood. It's the in-between part I have big problems with.

Sometimes literature from certain eras will use negative, racist terms and words to describe a person, peoples or practices. And sometimes in the context of such books we can read around this, as simply being chronologically representative of the way things were then. These terms and words are used in profusion in Scoop. Here, however, the attempted humor of the book too frequently depends on the reader's acceptance of the negative characteristics implied by the racist terms. In other words, if the reader doesn't accept the blatant racism of some of the 'humor,' it's not easy to find anything to laugh about. There are a few zingers about the way the press sometimes manufactures news, but not enough to ignore the cringe-inducing remainder of the reporter's African adventures. Not recommended.
Show Less
LibraryThing member karl.steel
Second time reading.

File this under guilty pleasures. I'm, well outraged isn't the right word, made weary by the dreariness of the other reviews of this book: plot summaries, gestures towards its transhistorical narratives (or towards its capturing that peculiar moment before the Nazis invaded
Show More
Poland), and hamfisted comparisons to P. G. Wodehouse (different sort of writer entirely, although, hilariously, Wodehouse does get a shoutout as the plot winds down). And then, well, there's the fact that the book is terribly racist. It's not racist in a Mein Kampf or Turner Diaries kind of way; there's no particular program Waugh wants to push; but the novel nevertheless goes hand-in-thoughtless-hand with the postwar atrocities committed by Britain in Kenya. Is this attitude inevitable? Simply a record of its time?

Of course not. Don't be foolish.

That said, it's delightful. I'm of course reminded of A. J. Liebling's war journalism. The plot should be a model for plots everywhere. The odd mixture of affection and contempt is characteristic of the best humor writing (see, for example, Diary of a Nobody or Cold Comfort Farm). I'm going a bit too far here: it's clear that Waugh finds the expropriation of Africa's natural resources by European colonial powers distasteful. And that's something.

I'd suggest, however, starting with The Loved One.
Show Less
LibraryThing member jeffome
I absolutely loved this little book! Ridiculous from start to finish, but in a good way......exposing all of the befuddled disconnectedness of not only Fleet Street press, but upper crust London Society and the landed (but broke) gentry. One blunder after another in the most ridiculous set of
Show More
circumstances finds our hero(?) William Boot yanked from the comfort of his run-down country estate and plunged headlong into a political war in Africa.....nothing is as it seems....and for once, lack of initiative actually saves the day. I cannot say how many times i chuckled out loud as i read this.....nor can i say when the last time was i read a book that caused me to chuckle out loud over and over! Waugh hits this with a biting wit and allows these absolutely ridiculous (yet believable) people to thrive in their self-induced chaos, and we are just along for the ride. So glad to have read this. Thank you Evelyn Waugh!
Show Less
LibraryThing member quiBee
An innocent abroad, a rural correspondant of "The Daily Beast", William Boot, gets sent overseas to cover the unrest in the African kingdom of Ishmaelia.
Apparently, not a totally inaccurate way of how foreign wars were covered, i.e. from a distance and quite a bit of it made up, which is
Show More
disconcerting. (Of course, nothing like that would ever happen today....?)
Show Less
LibraryThing member cmbohn
Evelyn Waugh was one of those authors that I had somehow considered difficult for some reason. I mean, Brideshead Revisited and all that. But the description of this wicked little story sounded so tempting that I had to give it a try. I will definitely be reading more.

Scoop is the story about a
Show More
modern war. Or rather, about modern journalism and how they report on a war. The war is in the fictional African country of Ismaelia, and our intrepid reporter is sent off to get the story. The Megalopolitan News Agency wants to be the first to break the story. Lady Stitch recommends her good friend, Mr. Boots. But a hapless editor hires the wrong Mr. Boots, and William is sent off quite unwillingly to cover a war he knows nothing about and which, in fact, hasn't really started yet. (But the paper still wants news of a victory around the first of July.)

Naive country gentleman William is soon mixing with a crowd of veteran news reporters, barnyard animals, a somewhat faithful German wife, a Scandinavian missionary, and a crowd of politicians as eager to avoid him as he is to speak to them. Only when events take a strange and sudden turn does William find his chance to get the story and get back home to England.

I have to add that this book is full of racial slurs. My impression is that they are mostly used to describe the close minded, bigoted attitude of the Europeans in the story, but it was still pretty shocking in parts. I really don't remember the last time I read anything quite this offensive, so take a warning from that.

My favorite quote from the story is when William is discussing the situation with his editor, Mr. Salter, just before leaving England.

"I don't read the papers very much. Can you tell me who is fighting who in Ishmaelia?"

"I think it's the Patriots and the Traitors."

"Yes, but which is which?"

"Oh, I don't know that. That's Policy, you see. It's nothing to do with me."

Very cynical, but very funny. Now I want to give that Brideshead Revisited book or whatever it is a try.
Show Less
LibraryThing member annbury
This classic British novel raises the issue of "presentism" in crystal clear focus -- it is a wonderfully written and scathingly funny novel, but it is also racist. In 1938, when the book was written, British racism didn't bother to be covert (it was after all only 30 years earlier that Kipling
Show More
referred to "lesser breeds without the law") and this book is full of racist opinions, and racist language. Should we judge the views and language of 1938 by the standards of 2011? To do so is to commit "presentism". That's an attitude that would cut one off from a lot of the great and enjoyable literature of the past, and one that I generally try to avoid. I did so with "Scoop", and enjoyed it a lot, despite fairly frequent cringes. BUT I can't always suspend the will to be offended, especially when it's my identity group that's getting dumped on -- as soon as I read what Mencken had to say about women, for example, I gave up on Mencken. I think a lot of readers may not be able to avoid being offended by this novel. Essentially, I'd have to put a caution lable on a positive recommendation -- "A Riot, but Racist"
Show Less
LibraryThing member jddunn
A savagely hilarious satire of the intersecting worlds of sensationalistic journalism, politics, and high society. Possibly even more relevant today than when it was written.
LibraryThing member gemilyinterrupted
this book had me cracking up laughing. waugh was a master of satire.
LibraryThing member xinyi
as ever, Waugh's mastery of English sense of humour is super! love it!
LibraryThing member wendyrey
A satire of newspaper life in the inter war years, a comedy of manners and full absurdist humour. Entertaining and fun.
LibraryThing member cyberoo
The most enjoyable book I've ever read. Had me in giggling like a schoolgirl from beginning to end.
LibraryThing member edella
Lord Copper, newspaper magnate and proprietor of the Daily Beast, has always prided himself on his intuitive flair for spotting ace reporters. That is not to say he has not made the odd blunder, however, and may in a moment of weakness make another.Acting on a dinner-party tip from Mrs Algernon
Show More
Smith, he feels convinced that he has hit on just the chap to cover a promising little war in the African Republic of Ishmaelia. One of Waugh's most exuberant comedies, Scoop is a brilliantly irreverentsatire of Fleet Street and its hectic pursuit of hot news.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Intemerata
For the most part, a gentle, charming satire - part of its charm being that it doesn't come across as bitter and cynical in the way that much satire does.

Some of the vocabulary and of the depictions of Africa and Africans did make me wince - this is very much a book of its time in that respect.
LibraryThing member js229
Good fun, but barely a novel, more a collection of deftly drawn caricatures. Lord Copper is the most marvelously monstrous of all and it is striking how many true notes he could strikes as a tycoon of the 1990s not the 1930s. Up to a point at least.
LibraryThing member PilgrimJess
This is the first Evelyn Waugh book that I have read and having now done so feel that I have been sorely missing. I mean I love PG Wodehouse so why not Waugh?

The book appears at first glance to be a simple tale of mistaken identity as an obscure country gent is sent to Africa as the foreign
Show More
correspondant of the Beast newspaper instead of an inspiring author but it soon becomes evident that it is more than that. It is a parody of journalism, communism. fascism and colonialism all in one. The book was written in the 1930's and should the power of the press, when foreign correspondants telegraphed the headlines of stories back to their headquarters for others to fill in the gaps solely dependant with their owners' pre-disposed opinion. Where papers could create tension where none existed. I loved the idea of a journalist locking himself away from his companions for a few days then making up some story of some daring deed before leaving the country before anyone can question them. I often like to watch the News 24 channels and often feel that the reporters there are trying to create a story where one does not exist just to fill time so feel that this story has a relevance in todays world.

I loved the characters from the pompous Lord Cooper, the inept William and fighty Katchen and although in many repects they were like ships passing in the night as they flitted in and out they gave a certain depth and pathos to the tale.

Waugh's style is more satirical rather outright humourous and as such is different than Wodehouse but all the same the book made me laugh out loud at times, the writting style quirky yet succinct and overall I really enjoyed it.
Show Less
LibraryThing member ElaineRuss
Brilliantly observed and written. This is only the second novel by Waugh I've read. He is quite possibly one of the sharpest writers I have ever read.
LibraryThing member alexrichman
A satire with a farcical story that holds back from becoming a 'farce', this is the sharpest sketch of Fleet Street ever written - a shame, because it deals with foreign affairs and so the newsroom passages are brief.
LibraryThing member P_S_Patrick
Like some of Waugh's other comic novels, Scoop is based loosely on Waugh's personal experiences, and amuses the reader with its clever satirisation of virtually every aspect on which the book is based. In this case, we have a story about a rural journalist, who writes on countryside matters, who is
Show More
by pure bad luck signed up as a foreign correspondent and sent out of the country to report on a civil war in a small country in Africa. He is clueless of course, but as an Englishman he blunders through and manages to do his best, even going as far (mainly by luck) as to get the eponymous Scoop.
Scoop is of a similar quality to Waugh's Decline and Fall, and nearly as good as Black Mischief, which is probably the funniest book I've read. This is definitely one for fans of Waugh, and a good place to start for those who have not before experienced his brilliant humour.
Show Less
LibraryThing member IreneSM
This is very funny, full of ridiculous and eccentric characters with ludicrous names, and a quick succession of farcical situations which somehow Waugh makes believable. Some reviewers describe the language as dated, but this is its charm. If only more modern authors could write with such wit!
LibraryThing member cdddddd
Pretty clever throughout but it turned out hilarious by the end.
LibraryThing member AnnB2013
Very funny and proof that there's nothing wrong with long, twisty sentences when done right. Plus ca change and all that.
LibraryThing member exitfish
Some people claim this is funny (even "hilarious"?!), but I found it to be only mildly, situationally funny. In fact, the fun is far outweighed by the racist and imperialist attitudes all though out the book. All the satire of journalism stuff is alright, but it's not worth the ugliness.
LibraryThing member stacyinthecity
London newspaper satire. This book is filled with mistaken identies, satirical political intrigue, and don't forget, the big scoop on the story!

Language

Barcode

5018
Page: 0.9541 seconds