Scoop by Evelyn Waugh has been in my imaginary to read pile for several years now. I kept reading lists that included it as one of the best comic novels ever written. The only other book I've read by Waugh is Brideshead Revisited which I think I've read at least twice. I kept thinking to myself: must read more Waugh! And then lately my oldest daughter had been talking about a friend of hers who is getting his Ph.D. in literature and is already a pretty well known authority on Waugh. He's apparently read everything Waugh has ever written and has some refreshing insights into Waugh's craft. So, due to the marvels of the kindle, I was trying to think of what to read next and all this coalesced in my mind and I downloaded Scoop and started reading.
The book is about a young man, William Boot, who accidentally gets sent to cover a possible war in a country in Africa. He is completely out of his element and all sorts of revolution, subterfuge, and political machinations are going on around him, that he is only dimly aware of. But his simplicity and stubbornness always seem to unwittingly protect him from disaster. It is full of absurdly comic situations.
So this book is funny and I am sure it is scathing and clever in its satire, if only I knew more about British foreign correspondents in Africa before World War II, I am sure I would have understood it a lot better. I felt at a definite disadvantage. I'd read something and think, gee, I bet if I knew what the author was referring to, I'd be hooting about his witty skewering of whatever it is. So I feel like a lot of this book just flew over my head.
Also, no one ever, ever, in all the reviews I read and all the accolades written about it, ever mentioned how racist it is. It is rather overtly racist. So while Waugh was parodying everybody, including the well-heeled English aristocrats and their colonialist mentality and their self-satisfied but myopic view of the world, he wasn't calling them names. He was just making fun of them. He does however use lots of bad names to refer to the Africans in the fictional country of Ismaelia (which apparently is based on Ethiopia). Now I can deal with some stuff like that in old literature. I don't get, for instance, getting upset about Huck Finn. Twain writes in the vernacular of the day, he's writing about racism and Jim is an extremely sympathetic character. The whole book is about freedom and one main theme is about how slavery is bad and African Americans deserve to be treated with dignity. And I just read some short stories by Chesterton and he includes the n word but again, it is vernacular and there is no debasing attitude attached to it. It is an unfortunate thing that reflects the time period in which he wrote. Another example is Penrod by Booth Tarkington. Again, the attitudes and language reveal how society viewed African Americans at that time, except in Penrod the two black boys are smart, sometimes smarter than Penrod, and completely endearing. They are great characters! So there is no demeaning element present in the book. However, in Scoop, I just didn't sense anything other than bigotry going on. What a shame.
The book reminded me of P. G. Wodehouse in its style of humor. In fact, in one scene at a dinner party, mention is made of somebody named Bertie Wodehouse some-other-last-name (I can't remember the full name right now). When I read that I thought, ah! So Waugh was deliberately mimicking Wodehouse here. Scoop has a cleverly crafted plot and Waugh writes brilliantly and is really great at using dialogue to reveal character. I acknowledge he is a wonderful writer, but I just couldn't appreciate this book the way I thought I would, given all the wonderful things I'd heard about it. Maybe I came to it with too high expectations. But I know I missed a lot of the satire and I just couldn't get over my distaste of the racist language.
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