I love Evelyn Waugh's work. Absolutely love it. Writing in the last days of Empire, between the two great wars, and as pedigreed old toffs living in grand country estates began to go the way of the Dodo, Waugh conjures up a time of disillusionment, but also of innocence.
Scoop follows the fortunes of one such penniless toff who, through a Lebowski-esque case of mistaken identity, gets shipped off to Africa as a war correspondent for a major metropolitan newspaper. Totally hapless and out-of-his-depth, William Boot (for that is his name) guides the reader through the cynical, mendacious world of reportage, and falls for a flaky young emigre who does nothing to hide her intention to fleece him for every penny she can squeeze out of his expense account.
As Boot stumbles upon a military coup and accidentally files the hottest story of the hour, Waugh's dead-pan satire touches on everything from British politics to the media, and imperialist intervention in the third-world. Entertaining, amusing and intelligent from first to last. (9/10)
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