Scoop

The Wrong Man in the Right Place

William Boot writes a column called Lush Places for the Daily Beast, a nature column of extraordinary specificity about badgers and weather and the English countryside, full of sentences like “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.” He has never been a foreign correspondent. He barely knows where Ishmaelia is. He is sent there because Lord Copper, the Daily Beast’s proprietor, has confused him with another, more distinguished, writer named Boot who has expressed an opinion about the African crisis and whom Lord Copper wishes to reward with the assignment.

This is Waugh’s Scoop — a satire of the press, of foreign correspondence, and of the manufacturing of news that was published in 1938 based partly on Waugh’s own experience covering the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. The fictional country of Ishmaelia is in the grip of a political crisis whose exact nature no one, including the journalists sent to cover it, can determine. The foreign press corps assembles in its sweaty hotel, files dispatches based on rumour and invention, and develops a collective version of events that may or may not bear any relationship to what is actually happening.

William Boot arrives equipped with seventy-two cases of luggage selected for him by the Daily Beast’s equipment department — including a collapsible canoe and a vast quantity of cleft sticks — and finds himself both more and less prepared than his professional colleagues. His bewilderment is genuine; theirs is manufactured. His dispatches, produced in confusion, turn out to be approximately correct; their confident filing is invented. The satire is elegant and has lost none of its edge: foreign correspondence has not fundamentally changed since 1938.

Lord Copper and the Press Machine

The novel’s satirical centre is not in Ishmaelia but in London, in the offices of Megalopolitan Newspapers and the person of Lord Copper — modelled on Beaverbrook, Northcliffe, and the entire tradition of proprietorial press barons who know exactly what they think before they know what has happened. Lord Copper is surrounded by subordinates who have developed an elaborate linguistic protocol for disagreeing with him without using the word “no”: “Up to a point, Lord Copper” is the formula, applied to propositions of varying absurdity. The journalist Salter, dispatched to rural England to find William Boot and persuade him to go to Ishmaelia, is Waugh’s portrait of a professional entirely shaped by his institution’s requirements.

The confusion that generates the plot — wrong man sent to the wrong place, everyone pretending to understand what they cannot — is both the novel’s central comic device and its satirical argument. Journalism, Waugh suggests, runs on exactly this confusion: the appearance of authority, the vocabulary of certainty, the professional posture of the person who knows what is happening while events remain stubbornly opaque. William Boot, who makes no claims to understand anything, ends up inadvertently breaking the story that all the professionals have missed.

The ending, in which the consequences of Boot’s success are entirely absorbed by the institution that sent him — the credit redistributed, the confusion resolved, the machine running on — is Waugh’s last satirical twist: systems do not learn from their anomalies; they neutralize them.

Our rating: 4.5/5 — A perfect comic novel about journalism that is also, in its understanding of how news is made, entirely serious — and entirely current.