The Lie of the Land '38 (Scoop - Evelyn Waugh)

Member Name: Shuyanin59

Product:	Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
Date:	05/09/01 (100 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Educational, Sympathy for ordinary people, Impeccable style

Disadvantages: One-sided

“Delicious!” – that is how Irina, a college friend of mine who turned me on to the wonderland of classical music, would comment on a performance she enjoyed. Yeah, “DELICIOUS” is the right word to describe my feelings about the novel. For my musical, literary and culinary delights have much in common, and it’s easy to draw a parallel among them. The dishes I relish have many nutritious ingredients, a rich taste with an exhilarating rise-and-fall of tints. They are true works of culinary art, and I wonder why we stop short of applauding as we rise from the table in a restaurant (or why, if we are that much satisfied, we do not send a bouquet of flowers to the chef – he is no worse than any maestro…)

“Scoop” belongs to a rare class of humorous books I enjoy especially for the masterfully “cooked” mingle of witty, funny and incisively keen observations offered in a light-hearted, good-natured manner. Waugh’s touch is reminiscent of those of Voltaire, N. Gogol and O. Wilde and contrasts markedly with those of J. Swift, J. Heller and Th. Sharpe. I believe “Scoop” was a great improvement on “Decline and Fall” by the same author, which was flat for my palate.

“Scoop” deals as devastating a blow to newspaperdom as the movie “Naked Gun” does to slapdash thrillers. By a twist of fate, William Boot, a nature columnist for “The Beast”, is torn out of his familiar surroundings in rural England and put on a mission to Ishmaelia, “a country in North-Easterly quarter of Africa”, reportedly fraught with imminent civil war. Thus his shoot to stardom begins, and he comes near to getting a K.C.B. for his coverage of a week or so that shook Ishmaelia. But he learns too much about the intricacies of international journalism; besides, he does have a mind of his own and does have something precious inside of himself to care
for…

Waugh’s account of Ishmaelian history and culture is another strong point of the novel, quite on a par with the best of “Gulliver’s Travels” by J. Swift and “The History of a Town” by M. Saltykov-Shchedrin. I liked very much his exposure of the workings of bureaucratic machinery, too.

The novel came out in 1938, and, in terms of technology, hype and political influence, today’s mass media are certainly not what they used to be. But their essence (the ravenous pursuit of hot news that border on pure invention) has remained unchanged. And everything Waugh says of newspapers is true to this very day and may be applied to the rest of contemporary mass media.

Let me refer to my own experience. One day I was shocked to hear over the radio that a man was shot to death at a subway station in central Moscow. I knew that my elderly dad was going to have a rendezvous right then and there. I imagined the panic and the commotion all too well, and my first impulse was to go there at once. But I had an urgent task on my hands in the office, glimmers of hope survived inside me – so I called the police to learn who was the victim, if there were any casualties, etc. The line was busy; it was hard to wait to get through. Eventually, an officer on duty told (for an umpteenth time, evidently) me that the whole “story” was a lie. Enraged, I demanded that the FM station refute it and offer apologies to listeners concerned.

They did nothing. As one of the novel’s characters smartly explains: it would have been “risky… and unprofessional. It’s the kind of thing you can do once or twice in a real emergency, but it doesn’t pay. They don’t like printing [or voicing] denials – naturally. Shakes public confidence in the Press. Besides, it looks as if we weren’t doing our job properly”. What is more, the lie was a feather in the cap f
or some reporter working for the renowned radio station, which is very popular with Moscovites and with Western media, too. Unfortunately, the explanation reached me many months after the incident, and a pretty rosy picture of mass media was on my mind then.

But let us not forget the other side of the coin. Waugh had many good reasons not to mention it in his book, but I will. There have always been and will always be principled and courageous people among the newsmen. It is to them that we owe the fact that a number of trustworthy news sources are available yet.

For all I know, civil war had failed to materialize in fictitious Ishmaelia. But in a year or so, Europe saw the daybreak of September 1, 1939. “Outside the owls hunted maternal rodents and their furry brood” – this is the closing line of the outstanding novel.

Summary: