Clever | Scoop | Evelyn Waugh

Casual racisim mars the humor | Scoop | Evelyn Waugh

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	• Scoop Evelyn Waugh Back Bay Books, 1999 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 44 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Happy Waugh Writes Great Spoof Scoop [75]

Perhaps when "Scoop" was rewritten, Waugh lived his best years - 1937-1938 - in 1937 he married Laura Herbert who gave birth to their daughter Teresa Waugh in 1938.

This book resonates with British farce. People's discussions seem to always be on different wavelengths. Amid these discussions where neither side appears to listen to the other, mistaken identities arise. But, when these extremely embarrassing moments are discovered, the British aristocratic self attempts to cavalierly treat these major gaffs as minor trivialities - apply bandages to hemorrhages.

The spoof of "Scoop" reminds me so much of the self-deprecatory humor found in Kingsley Amis - most particularly "Lucky Jim." Everything is formal, and everything formal encounters an everyday fumble by "one of the clan." Each demands that we laugh at ourselves. And, the readers are invited to join the chuckle - which this reader often did.

The plot is about a paper hiring a novice to handle a "scoop" for a red rebellion in fictitious Ishmael - where Bolshevik-mimicking rebels fight the present power which merely seeks to cash out his country in gold to whomever can provide the gold to him most expediently and abundantly. Interestingly, the British concern of this story is mesmerized by the paper's novice writer - John Boot. You have to read the story to see how John Boot is not the John Boot they thought nor the one in the end who they applaud.

Unlike some other classics by Waugh - "Brideshead Revisited" or "Handful of Dust" - the protagonist and those around him are not spiraling downward to a life of everlasting disappointment. Instead, our John Boot is a goofball country bumpkin - of the British kind - whose bumbling antics lead to impressive successes. He is the original Inspector Clousseau, the original Maxwell Smart, or the original Forrest Gump. Although some perspectives may not see our John Boot to be as profoundly successful as those parties, his amateur feats do lead to the quintessential British accomplishment - knighthood.

The humor in this book is probably reflective of when times were good for Waugh - before World War II. After World War II, characters' suffering - something hardly noticed in this book - become a focus in Waugh's literature. Although he is a master whose literature resounds before and after the war, this reader likes lighter reading on certain occasions and this book was a great choice for the holiday weekend.

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Clever

Overall, a very satisfying read, but somewhat disjointed. The beginning and ending -- the two parts which take place at Boot Magna in the English countryside -- are laugh-out-loud funny. The middle section, which takes place with the protaganist, William Boot, in the mythical African nation of Ishmaelia, is more straightforward and serious. The portions of the book which chronicle Boot's relationship with Katchen felt like they were torn out of a Hemingway book, given the sparse dialog and direct emotions. I felt as if this book might have been started by a very young, impressionable Waugh during a time when he was experimenting with different styles, trying to find the one which best suited him... styles borrowed from Hemingway, Wodehouse, and Greene. Its slightly disjointed nature made me think that it was a book which he worked on in fits and starts... would write a little, put it back in the drawer, revisit it a couple of months later. Overall, it's a very good book by a writer a few years away from his peak.

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Casual racisim mars the humor

Overall, I'm conflicted in my feelings for this book. On the main themes - how journalists make stories up to sell papers, how rewards and punishments are completely random with no regards to merit, and how humans are generally horrible and stupid - the book is very funny in Waugh's dryly satirical style. However, the blatant racism makes the book an uncomfortable read.

The plot revolves around a reluctant British reporter sent to cover a civil war in Africa. This being Waugh, I was prepared for the sarcastically bitter political humor. I know he hates most things British; and all things Non. But still, the casual dismissal of the Africans the main character lives amongst is shocking. The Africans (and a few Arabs and Indians who wander through the story) are backdrops to the action; local color, comic relief, chess pieces for the Europeans to move around for their amusement and greed. An angry goat is attributed with more human thoughts than any of the non-European human characters. It is clear in the book that these attitudes were not at all shocking to the British in 1937; the author hardly seems aware of them.

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A dry martini of a novel

Heady and incredibly fun, this 1930s' look at the curious animal known as "foreign correspondent" is one hilarious read. Much of the book is tongue and cheek and a bitch-slap to the world of competitive newspapers (far more important then than now).

The story centers around a hapless rural-life columnist for a London newspaper, who is mistaken for someone else and sent to Africa to report on the bloody conflict in a fictional country (which predicts, a bit, the reality of the 1960s). He is bunked down with a gaggle of correspondents from competing papers, each determined to get the scoop and win appaluse back in England. The comraderie, back-stabbing, misinformation and one-upsmanship is all just a vodka swallow away from how journalism really works.

The reporters make up so much of their stories that when our hero actually gets a real hot one, he is told that -- even though it is true -- he can't file it because the fictional version was discredited the day before. If you can follow that sentence, you will love "Scoop."

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Waugh's farce about the newspaper trade and making a name for oneself

Evelyn Waugh's send-up of the newspaper business, and where in other novels he could be bitterly satirical, here he's wildly farcical and broadly comical. William Boot, a nature writer for the DAILY BEAST, ("Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole" is given as an example of his "high-class style" of writing), is mistaken for the novelist John Boot and is sent to the African country of Ishmaelia. Here he encounters other journalists, many of them American, who are all looking for the scoop that will make them famous. Boot meets and falls in love with a woman named Kachen, and immediately the naïve Boot is in over his head romantically. But it's she who slips Boot the news about a planned coup d'etat, and the simple-minded journalist scoops everyone and eventually comes home a hero. Of course the wrong Boot (John) is given knighthood and the book ends, after additional mistaken identities are made, with everything being righted and Boot (William) going back to writing his innocuous nature articles, none the worse (or better) for wear. Waugh's humor is bright and airy, very reminiscent of P.G. Wodehouse, who is actually alluded to at one point in the story. Lots and lots of laughs from beginning to end.

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Evelyn Waugh was one of literature's great curmudgeons and a scathingly funny satirist. Scoop is a comedy of England's newspaper business of the 1930s and the story of William Boot, a innocent hick from the country who writes careful essays about the habits of the badger. Through a series of accidents and mistaken identity, Boot is hired as a war correspondent for a Fleet Street newspaper. The uncomprehending Boot is sent to the fictional African country of Ishmaelia to cover an expected revolution. Although he has no idea what he is doing and he can't understand the incomprehensible telegrams from his London editors, Boot eventually gets the big story.

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