13 MAY 1938, Page 34

INTRODUCING THE BOOTS

Scoop. A Novel about Journalists. By Evelyn Waugh. (Chapman and Hall. 7s. 6d.)

MR. WAUGH has had his eye on the Press since (at the latest 193o, the year of Vile Bodies and the birth of the Excess. In eight years his Fleet Street has changed little. There is of course some new blood in the monde, Lord Monomark appears to have retired, the Excess (one assumes) has ceased publication or subsists obscurely on dwindling sales, for Lord Copper now crows upon his hill and supremacy is disputed between the Daily Brute and the Daily Beast. But the principles upon which Fleet Street conducts its affairs remain unchanged. In Scoop, as in Vile Bodies, and almost as in life, it is a Wonderland in which the extravagant or the idiotic is also the inevitable. Mr. Waugh fixes on the fantastic place an eye unlit by surprise and undimmed by pity, and with the utmost composure announces to the world what that superhumanly discerning eye detects.

It detects a number, much too large to be catalogued, of highly entertaining things—the mortification of William Boot, who contributes to the Beast a nature column (" Feather footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole . . . "), torn from his cherished obscurity and sent in mistake for someone else as war correspondent to Ishmaelia, where there is no war ; the mortification of his distant cousin John Boot, for whom this jaunt was intended, belatedly consoled with a knighthood meant for his cousin William, returned, through no merit of his own, in triumph ; Ishmaelia, congested with war correspondents and administered with benevolent inefficiency by a ruling family named Jackson, of whom President Rathbone Jackson, General Gollancz Jackson, Messrs. Garnett, Huxley and Mandel. Jackson, and Mrs. Earl Russell Jackson are the most taking and among the most important ; Mrs. Stich, a fetching and resourceful recruit to Lady Metroland's troupe, who evade., the inconvenience of traffic blocks by driving her diminutive car along the pavement ; Lord Copper, the victim of such sudden enthusiasms as -appoint trick cyclists to edit Sporting Pages, and the members of Lord Copper's staff, shooed from post to post in , the Megalopolitan building (" numbers 700-853 Fleet Street ") in obedience to Lord Copper's policy of keeping his subordinates alert by changes of occupation ; the Boot family, of Boot Magna Hall. The Boot family is the particular triumph of this book. It is all, from the first page to the much too soon reached last, magnificent entertainment ; but the Boot ménage, from Uncle Theodore, with his comple- mentary passions for sacred music and feline prowlings after dark, to the bevy of retainers reclining about Boot Magna Hall in varying degrees of invalid retirement, reveals an inventive power which it is little exaggeration to call that of genius.

What makes Mr. Waugh's novels so much superior as entertainment to any other fiction written today ? His inventive talent, his intelligence, the flexibility of his prose contribute ; but more important than these is his gift, so desirable in a satirist and so rare, of never losing either head or temper while engaged in the work of demolition. The world he seems to regard as an asylum, but he walks through it with calm and distinguishes the eccentricities and unpleasant habits of the inmates without surprise, sentiment, or resentment. Almost all his contemporaries could take lessons from him in technique. His books are so easy to read that it is possible to overloo. how intricately they are organised. They are exactly of th_ length and of the form which their subject requires ; there 1 never a word wasted or an emphasis misplaced. I do ne think that Scoop, as a whole, is as good as some of Mr. Waugh. other books, but that is merely because I find Europe a mor.:. effective background to his characters than the other con- tinents. But it is none the less an enchanting book, which like everything written by Mr. Waugh can be reread with pleasure as often as the whim takes one. And I implore him on some later occasion to let us know more about the Boot,