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 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.

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The "Catch-22" of journalism. Sharp and funny. ( )

Hilarious satire of journalism. ( )

A hilarious, satiric romp from London to the countryside to "Ishmaelia" in East Africa. Waugh's characters, use of language, and just plain good storytelling make this a great book! ( )

Really puts the Boot in. ( )

A satire of newspaper life in the inter war years, a comedy of manners and full absurdist humour. Entertaining and fun. ( )

The most enjoyable book I've ever read. Had me in giggling like a schoolgirl from beginning to end. ( )

as ever, Waugh's mastery of English sense of humour is super! love it! ( )

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, 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. ( )

this book had me cracking up laughing. waugh was a master of satire. ( )

Slow hilarity. That's the best description I can come up with for Waugh's particular brand of gradually crescendoing absurdity. Scoop isn't the kind of book you can open to just any page and find a gem of a passage, but it's not for lack of authorial mastery. It's really just that Waugh's humor is very dry, and he tells his jokes little by little, revealing details judiciously and developing connections between his many characters in a seemingly offhand manner.

And it is the characters who really make this novel what it is--a motley cast of misfits, each trying to get by, mostly without ambition or understanding and certainly without any real sense of connection to the rest of the human race.

At the center of it all is bewildered William Boot, yanked inexplicably from his life of genteel semi-poverty in the English countryside and dispatched to the northeastern African nation of Ishmaelia as a war correspondent for the Beast. With only a bottomless expense account to guide him, our confuddled young hero doggedly attempts to do what's expected of him. But since he's actually not even the journalist the paper meant to send, he blunders continuously and pathetically.

Ishmaelia, once he finally reaches it, presents an object lesson in the "art" of journalism. Hordes of correspondents have converged on Ishmaelia because its highly unstable political situation has captured the interest of Europe and England--except that no one in Ishmaelia seems to be aware of, or care about, or even acknowledge, a political situation of any kind. So the journalists lounge around drinking, playing ping pong, getting insanely overcharged, and occasionally firing off dutiful wireless cables to their editors. The cables, which are filled with nonsense of the most improbable kind, generally conveyed in 10 words or less, are worked over and splashed onto front pages as thrilling, dire headlines. And William, who probably never told a lie in his whole life (because he never even thought of it), simply cannot wrap his mind around the business. Even when he lucks into some real news, it doesn't matter, because What Really Took Place just happens to be something the newspapers have already denied. And how could a paper maintain the trust of the people if were to be retracting what it had reported as fact?

But Boot triumphs. Sort of. In this ridiculous world Waugh has created--one which contains more than a kernel of truth--only the most ridiculous person, who has the least possible interest in (let alone understanding of) what he's supposed to be doing, through the most unlikely series of coincidences, can come upon the Holy Grail of Ishmaelite news and bring glory to himself and his paper.

Waugh's dryness and convoluted vocabulary and product-of-his-times racism mean he's not for everybody. But if you like a novel that falls into place bit by bit in a decidedly satisfying way, and can appreciate the artful decimation of naive ideas like "journalistic integrity" and "governmental competence," then give this unusual book a chance. ( )

London newspaper satire. This book is filled with mistaken identies, satirical political intrigue, and don't forget, the big scoop on the story! ( )

A satire on the British journalism trade of the time. The books includes some characters met in earlier Waugh books, though it stands on its own as funny, a little aggressive, and unsparing to the point of maybe wanting a little charity. ( )