Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > Scoop

"I think it is a very promising little war"-- Lord Copper, the London Beast Executive Editor, in Scoop

Scoop (1938) by Evelyn Waugh is a satire about journalism and colonialism. I know Waugh and Graham Greene were journalists and friends and both wrote satires/critiques of journalism and colonialism. I thought of Greene’s The Quiet American and (especially) Our Man from Havana as I read this, as both are decidedly literary fiction and deeply satirical in similar ways.

Scoop made the Modern Library (1999) list of the 100 best novels of the twentieth century written in English, coming in at #75. And I had never read it. Waugh’s Handful of Dust was #34, and Brideshead Revisited was #80; Greene’s only novel to make the list is Heart of the Matter. Lists are such fun to quibble about.

William Boot, a sometime contributor of notes to one of two major London newspapers--The Beast; the other is The Brute--is mistaken for a better known novelist named John Boot and handpicked by the editor to fly to the fictional country Ishmaelia in East Africa to cover a civil war. He knows nothing of the war, nor of journalism, really, and does no research to find out what’s really going on. “What’s a news network?" he asks an actual journalist. He’d never even flown in a plane.

When he gets to Ishmaelia he finds several journalists who drink their way through days hoping to get the “scoop” on a war they neither know nor care about. One of the points of the novel is that even if there is little news happening, the world's media descending on this country requires that something happen (or they invent something to happen) to please their editors and owners back home. And so yes, they will create news. One central joke in the book is that the clueless Boot with the help of a woman actually does create a scoop, earning him high praise in the world papers, knighthood, a banquet in his honor.

Of course some people at The Beast realize that the wrong Boot was sent, and that neither deserve knighthood, but hey, let’s hire them both at exorbitant salaries AND knight them, what the hell. It is a terrifically written satire on the politics and culture of an African country, on the ridiculous pomp and uselessness of British officials abroad. Everything gets satirized, basically, but a send-up of the newspaper business is its central subject.

What did Waugh know about East Africa? In 1930 he flew to Ethiopia as a journalist, sending back reports on the coronation of Haile Selassie.

One line satirizing Boot’s purple prose style was quoted for decades: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole. . .” An environmental magazine named itself The Questing Vole in honor of this bad writing.

Need a laugh? I highly recommend it! On to Handful of Dust and The Loved One, which I also had never read!