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I wrote the following after purchasing a copy of this novel and Black Mischief in 2023:

'Of course I have read this novel many times but not in years, in fact I haven't read any work by Waugh in years even though he was an author I loved greatly, sometimes you fear that the books you love in your youth may prove disappointments - particularly this one and Black Mischief - I fear I may not find them as funny. But I will find out before the end of 2023.'

It is now mid 2024 so I am behind schedule in my reading, as always, but I have now read, or reread (I read all of Waugh for the first time in my teenage years and some of it I reread several times), Scoop and intend to work my way through his oeuvre again. I had feared that I would find Scoop unreadable or offensive, it isn't, but it is problematic and I am going to treat both the novels strengths and weaknesses.

First of all Waugh was a writer of some of the finest English prose ever, and the opening 71 pages (in my edition) of the section 'The Stitch Service' is a masterpiece of complex plotting, jewel like precision and a use of minimal writing that should be studied by any aspiring writer. In those few pages he sets up all the major themes, characters and plot devices that will carry the novel through. When you consider that he creates fashionable Mayfair, Fleet Street and the grotesqueries of Boot Magna it is awe inspiring how much Waugh does with so few words. Because Waugh's writing can be described, I suppose, as cinematic, his novels, including this one, have been made into some dazzlingly mediocrefilms and writers as varied as William Boyd, John Mortimer and Stephen Fry have found that once you remove Waugh's words all you are left with is set dressing (please see my footnote *1). Adaptations of Waugh's novels like Scott Fitzgerald's invariably disappoint.

As a novel, and I refuse to use a qualifier like 'comic', Scoop is brilliant through its first two parts the already mentioned 'The Stitch Service' and the second part 'Stones £20' which makes up the bulk of the novel and sees the novels unlikely hero William Boot triumph. Unfortunately the concluding section 'Banquet' drags rather. Waugh doesn't seem able to end the novel or tie up all the loose ends, which is surprising when you consider the devastatingly brilliant endings he produced in Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust. Although only 32 pages (in my edition) 'Banquet' has longueurs which make it seem three times as long. For this reason I regard Scoop as flawed, there is even suspicion that Waugh got bored and wrote himself into a corner and floundered creating an ending.

As for the novel's problems? First off there is the problem of Evelyn Waugh. He was a particularly unlikeable writer, but then if we only read books by nice people the books left for reading would be dreadfully dull.

Is Scoop racist and anti semitic? There is language and phrases used that no one would dream of using now, or probably any time since WWII. But Waugh's intent was not to be racist or anti semitic, that doesn't mean he isn't. But if readers want to be as offended by Waugh as they would be by Julius Streicher's Der Sturmer or Thomas Dixon's The Clansman then they will be and nothing I can say will change it. If words like 'yids' or the 'n' word are used it is because Waugh reproduces how those were used in 1938. You have the same problem Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn. Were Twain and Waugh racists? By today's standards of course but not for their time (and Waugh and Twain were from eras and cultures alien to each other) and racism was not their intent.

In the case of Waugh one needs to be clear that though he wasn't, for his time, racist he was someone who never regarded anyone outside the gilded little world he existed in as of any importance. His English working or middle class characters are as cliched and limited as the inhabitants of Ishmaelia. They aren't fully rounded people, or characters but collections of knee jerk reactions. You have only to see how limited and two dimensional the locals who meet Slater at Boot Magna are compared to the inhabitants of Boot Hall.

I find it interesting that so many reviewers will obsess over Waugh's antique put downs and ignore his staggering insouciance about war, revolution, deaths, murder, rapine and pillage. It isn't simply the reproduction of the attitudes of foreign correspondents. It is an attitude that pervades a certain type of English literature of those times. There were people, those of an infinitesimally small class and background, and then there were the 'little people' - comic cockneys, annoying strikers, bolshie workers, the women or servants who keep their well oiled and comfortable lives going - when this novel was written they were just there and didn't have to be taken seriously. After WWII they couldn't be ignored or dismissed and most of the novels post WWII by Waugh and his confreres (Nancy Mitford, Ian Fleming et al) are long rants about uppity oiks who expected to be paid decent wages.

The shocking thing about Scoop is not that Waugh is racist or antisemitic but that he, and so many other English people of his background and generation, viewed the world as a place full of funny foreigners doing silly things because they were neither English nor ruled by England. Waugh is not just nasty about Jews or blacks he is nasty about anyone who wasn't part of his circle and that nastiness can encompass plenty of blue bloods as well. Waugh observes the world from outside, he is not part of it, he despises it. For this reason English literary and cultural life for most of the post WWI years is so insubstantial compared to countries like France. Where are England's Cocteau or Radinguet? never mind Bernanos, Celine, Malraux or Gide?

The final question, the only question is whether Scoop is worth reading. It is.

*1 John Mortimer cheated in his 1981 TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited by having large chunks of the novel read as voice over - this was possible with eleven hour long episodes but no cinema film has that luxury.