They were eaten, every one of them some raw, others stewed and seasonedĮvelyn Waugh worked in journalism for Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express and made journeys to Africa and South America reporting for a number of newspapers. They came as missionaries, ambassadors, tradesmen, prospectors, natural scientists.
Various courageous Europeans, in the seventies of the last century, came to Ishmaelia, or near it, furnished with suitable equipment of cuckoo clocks, phonographs, opera hats, draft-treaties and flags of the nations which they had been obliged to leave. The coup is overthrown the following day.Īnd although there is fun made of native incompetence in running the government, the naivety of its original colonisers is not forgotten: A military coup takes place, the first result of which is a proclamation abolishing Sundays. When a quarrel breaks out in the ruling family (leading to civil war) one faction declares that the Ishmaelites are in fact a white race who must ‘purge themselves of the Negro taint’. Voting is rigged, and ‘the adverse trade balance rectified by an elastic system of bankruptcy law’. The government is run entirely on a system of nepotism: every official is a member of the same family. Like its predecessor Black Mischief, Scoop is largely set in a fictional African country – Ishmaelia. There are three main targets for Evelyn Waugh’s satire in Scoop – African government, the English upper class, and the profession of journalism. Farcical misunderstandings abound, and the workings of the press come in for a great deal of satire. He is surrounded by villainy and deception on all sides. A naive and innocent young man is swept up into events which are beyond his control. It continues the comic themes he had established with Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), and A Handful of Dust (1934). Scoop (1938) was Evelyn Waugh’s fifth published novel. Tutorial, study guide, plot summary, web links
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