Scoop is a 1938 novel by
EnglishEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
writer
Evelyn WaughArthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was an English writer, best known for such darkly humorous and satirical novels as Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Scoop, A Handful of Dust, and The Loved One, as well as for serious works, such as Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy that clearly...
, a
satireSatire is often strictly defined as a literary genre or form; although in practice it is also found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, or other methods,...
of sensationalist
journalismJournalism is the craft of conveying news, descriptive material and comment via a widening spectrum of media. These include newspapers, magazines, radio and television, the internet and even, more recently, the mobile phone...
and foreign correspondence.
William Boot, a young man who lives in genteel poverty far from the iniquities of
London[]London is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. It has been a major settlement for two millennia, and the history of London goes back to its founding by the Romans, when it was named Londinium. London's core, the ancient City of London, the 'square mile', retains its medieval boundaries...
, writes a nature column for a national newspaper. He is dragooned into becoming a
foreign correspondentForeign Correspondent may refer to:*Foreign correspondent *Foreign Correspondent , an Alfred Hitchcock film*Foreign Correspondent , an Australian current affairs programme...
when the editors of the aptly named
Daily Beast mistake him for a novelist who shares his surname.
Scoop is a 1938 novel by
EnglishEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
writer
Evelyn WaughArthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was an English writer, best known for such darkly humorous and satirical novels as Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Scoop, A Handful of Dust, and The Loved One, as well as for serious works, such as Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy that clearly...
, a
satireSatire is often strictly defined as a literary genre or form; although in practice it is also found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, or other methods,...
of sensationalist
journalismJournalism is the craft of conveying news, descriptive material and comment via a widening spectrum of media. These include newspapers, magazines, radio and television, the internet and even, more recently, the mobile phone...
and foreign correspondence.
Plot
William Boot, a young man who lives in genteel poverty far from the iniquities of
London[]London is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. It has been a major settlement for two millennia, and the history of London goes back to its founding by the Romans, when it was named Londinium. London's core, the ancient City of London, the 'square mile', retains its medieval boundaries...
, writes a nature column for a national newspaper. He is dragooned into becoming a
foreign correspondentForeign Correspondent may refer to:*Foreign correspondent *Foreign Correspondent , an Alfred Hitchcock film*Foreign Correspondent , an Australian current affairs programme...
when the editors of the aptly named
Daily Beast mistake him for a novelist who shares his surname. He is sent to the
fictional African stateA fictional country is a country that is made up for fictional stories, and does not exist in real life. Fictional lands appear most commonly as settings or subjects of literature, movies, or video games...
of Ishmaelia where a
civil warA civil war is a war between organized groups within a single nation state, or, less commonly, between two nations created from a formerly-united nation state. The aim of one side may be to take control of the nation or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies...
threatens to break out. There, despite his total ineptitude, he accidentally manages to get the "scoop" of the title. When he returns, however, credit is diverted to the other Boot, and he is left to return to his bucolic pursuits, much to his relief.
Background
The novel is partly based on Waugh's own experience working for the
Daily MailThe Daily Mail is a British daily tabloid newspaper. First published in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, it is the United Kingdom's second biggest-selling daily newspaper after The Sun. Its sister paper, The Mail on Sunday was launched in 1982. Scottish and Irish editions of the paper were launched in...
, when he was sent to cover
Benito MussoliniBenito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini,
KSMOM GCTE was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism. He became the Prime Minister of Italy in 1922 and began using the title Il Duce by...
's expected invasion of
AbyssiniaEthiopia , officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country situated in the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia is bordered by Eritrea to the north, Sudan to the west, Kenya to the south, Somalia to the east and Djibouti to the northeast. Its size is 1,100,000 km² with an...
, what was later known as the
Second Italo-Abyssinian WarThe Second Italo–Abyssinian War was a brief colonial war that started in October 1935 and ended in May 1936. The war was fought between the armed forces of the Kingdom of Italy and the armed forces of the Ethiopian Empire...
. When he got his own scoop on the invasion he telegraphed the story back in
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...
for secrecy, but they discarded it. Waugh wrote up his travels more factually in
Waugh in Abyssinia (1936), which complements
Scoop.
Lord Copper, the newspaper magnate, is based on an amalgam of
Lord NorthcliffeAlfred Charles William Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe rose from childhood poverty to become a powerful British newspaper and publishing magnate, famed for buying stolid, unprofitable newspapers and transforming them to make them lively and entertaining for the mass market. During his...
and Lord Beaverbrook: a character so fearsome that his obsequious foreign editor, Mr Salter, can never openly disagree with any statement he makes, answering "Definitely, Lord Copper" and 'Up to a point, Lord Copper" in place of "yes" or "no". Lord Copper's idea of the lowliest of his employees is a book reviewer.
It is widely believed that Waugh based his hapless protagonist,
William BootWilliam Boot is a fictional journalist who is the protagonist in the 1938 Evelyn Waugh comic novel Scoop.-Character:Boot is the young author of a regular column on country life for a London newspaper named the Daily Beast; his affected style is typified in the notorious sentence "Feather-footed...
, on
Bill DeedesWilliam Francis Deedes, Baron Deedes, KBE, MC, PC, DL was a British journalist and politician. He is the only person in Britain to have been both a member of the British cabinet and the editor of a major daily newspaper....
, a junior reporter who arrived in
Addis AbabaAddis Ababa is the capital city of Ethiopia...
aged 22 with two
tonLong ton is the name for the unit called the "ton" in the avoirdupois or Imperial system of measurements, as used in the United Kingdom and several other Commonwealth countries. It has been mostly replaced by the tonne, and in the USA by the short ton. It is equal to or of salt water with a...
s of luggage. However, a more direct model is William Beach Thomas who, according to
Peter StothardSir Peter Stothard is a British newspaper editor, currently for the Times Literary Supplement, but of The Times from 1992 to 2002....
, "was a quietly successful countryside columnist and literary gent who became a calamitous Daily Mail war correspondent".
The novel is full of all but identical opposites: Lord Copper of the
Daily Beast, Lord Zinc of the
Daily Brute; the CumReds and the White Shirts, parodies of Communists (comrades) and Black Shirts (fascists) etc.
"Feather-footed through the plashy
fenA fen is a type of wetland fed by surface and/or groundwater. Fens are characterized by their water chemistry, which is neutral or alkaline...
passes the questing
voleA vole is a small rodent resembling a mouse but with a stouter body, a shorter hairy tail, a slightly rounder head, and smaller ears and eyes. There are approximately 155 species of voles. They are sometimes known as meadow mice or field mice in North America...
", a line from one of Boot's countryside columns, has become a famous comic example of overblown prose style. It inspired the name of the environmentalist magazine
VoleVole was a British environmentalist magazine published between 1977 and 1980. The magazine was intended to have a more light-hearted tone than the other countryside and ecology magazines of the time: the founders' working title for the magazine was "The Questing Vole", from a nature column...
, which was originally titled
The Questing Vole.
One of the points of the novel is that even if there is little news happening, the world's media descending upon a place requires that something happen to please their editors and owners back home, and so they will create news.
Reception
Christopher HitchensChristopher Eric Hitchens is an English-American author, journalist, and literary critic. He has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other media outlets...
, introducing the 2000 Penguin Classics edition of
Scoop, said "In the pages of Scoop we encounter Waugh at the mid-season point of his perfect pitch; youthful and limber and light as a feather" .
Scoop was made into a 1972 BBC serial and a
1987 British TV movieScoop is a 1987 TV film directed by Gavin Millar, adapted by William Boyd from the 1938 satirical novel by Evelyn Waugh. It was produced by Sue Birtwistle with executive producers Nick Elliott and Patrick Garland. Original music was made by Stanley Myers...
starring
Michael MaloneyMichael Maloney is an English actor.Born in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, Maloney's first television appearance was as Peter Barkworth's teenage son in the 1979 drama series, Telford's Change....
and
Denholm ElliottDenholm Mitchell Elliott, CBE was an English actor of stage and screen, with over 120 major film and TV credits.. Today he is probably most known for his roles in the Indiana Jones movies as Dr. Marcus Brody.-Early life:...
.
Scoop was included in
The ObserverThe Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In about the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a left-liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-History:The...
s list of the 100 greatest novels of all time, and ranked 75th in the Modern Library list of best 20th-century novelsModern Library's 100 Best Novels is a list of the best English-language novels of the 20th century as selected by the Modern Library. In the spring of 1998 the Modern Library polled its editorial board to find the best 100 novels of the 20th century. The board consisted of Daniel J. Boorstin, A. S...
.
What some see as "overt racism" in Scoop and Waugh's other writing while in Africa has been excused by some Ethiopian luminaries, because his humour, satire, cruelty and wit were both remarkable and directed at the foibles of his own country as well. Hitchens noted "he himself employs no term of hatred or contempt; his main fools are English or Swedish or German, and his villain -- the memorably-sketched Dr Benito -- is a suave and elegant and fluent black man."
Adaptions
William BoydWilliam Boyd may refer to:*William Boyd, 3rd Earl of Kilmarnock , Scottish nobleman*William Boyd, 4th Earl of Kilmarnock , Scottish nobleman*William Boyd , Scottish-Canadian professor and author...
adapted the novel into a screenplay, which was directed by
Gavin MillarGavin Millar is a Scottish film director.-Feature films:*1985 Dreamchild*1989 Danny the Champion of the World*2000 Complicity-TV:*1981 Cream in My Coffee*1982 Secrets; Intensive Care...
. It aired on April 26, 1987
The fictional newspaper in Scoop served as the inspiration for the title of
Tina BrownTina Brown is a journalist, magazine editor, columnist, talk-show host and author of The Diana Chronicles, a biography of Diana, Princess of Wales, a personal friend. Born a British citizen, she became a United States citizen in 2005...
's online news source,
The Daily BeastThe Daily Beast is a news reporting and opinion website published by Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. About one-third of its content is original, while the rest is aggregated links to articles written by other news outlets. The Daily Beast was launched October 6, 2008,...
.
In 2009 the novel was serialised and broadcast on
BBC Radio 4BBC Radio 4 is a domestic UK radio station that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967.-Outline:...
.
External links