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Sarah Lonsdale looks at how journalists are portrayed in novels and fi lms


Fact or fi ction I


t was the recently departed Christopher Hitchens who put his fi nger on why Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop is time and again named as journalists’ favourite novel. Even though the foreign correspondents who gather in the


fi ctional Ishmaelia to cover a will o’ the wisp war are incompetent liars, there is somewhere in Waugh’s prose an incontestable truth, argued Hitchens. Deep down every journalist knows the intellectual terrain they inhabit, as they attempt to explain an inexplicable Universe, is “Absurdistan”. As well as being fantasy, Scoop is also, said Hitchens, a work of “pitiless realism”. Maybe that is partly why so many journalists, obsessive chroniclers of their own trade, have written novels, plays and screenplays about their lives and their work. The


10 Best British Novels about Journalism


Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938) Mendacious press pack hilariously fl oundering around in fi ctional Abyssinia. Contains the matchless satire of ‘country notes’ writing: “Feather- footed through the plashy fens passes the questing vole.” The Quiet American by Graham Greene (1955) The master of C20 English fi ction at his alienated best. World-weary foreign correspondent Thomas Fowler muddles up jealous love with political commitment in war-torn Saigon. The Pathway of the Pioneer by Dolf


Wyllarde (1906) Long-forgotten evocation of pioneer Edwardian women journalists eking out a living in cheap boarding houses – a kind of New Grub Street for women. The Upper Pleasure Garden by Gordon M. Williams (1970) Dark account of a newspaper reporter who sells his soul for the sake of a good story. Briefl y surfaces to consider his shortcomings before returning because he is trapped in “the only job where they paid you a wage for fi nding men who built the Taj Mahal out of empty beer bottles”.


Keeping Up Appearances by Rose Macaulay (1928) Twenties ‘it’ girl hides a dreadful secret – she is in fact a women’s page journalist writing inane articles such as ‘Should Clever Women Marry?’ The strain of disguising


her true self splits her personality into three. Everyone’s Gone to the Moon by Philip Norman (1995) Luscious evocation of the Sunday Times Magazine in its mid-sixties heyday. Contains an interesting and not altogether fl attering portrayal of the great Harry Evans. The Enormous Shadow by Robert Harling (1955) Action-packed Cold War thriller about a journalist on the trail of a defecting nuclear scientist aided and abetted by a Labour MP. Uncommon Danger by Eric Ambler (1937) Superb thirties thriller


wherein likable freelance Desmond Kenton becomes unwittingly involved in a Nazi plot to destabilise Romania. The Work of Oliver Byrd by Adeline Sergeant (1902) Poignant tale of a gifted female journalist who can only get on in a fast- expanding Fleet Street by pretending to be a man. Yellow Dog by Martin Amis (2003) Amis at his objectionable best. Clint Smoker, reporter of the Lark calls his readers ‘wankers’ and fatally falls for a woman whose language is even more denuded than his own.


journalist and author Annalena McAfee, founding editor of the Guardian Review, and who wrote her own novel about newspapers, The Spoiler in 2011, said: “I’ve only ever met one journalist who didn’t want to write a book.” And many of these books are newspaper fi ctions (I also have one in my bottom drawer). Exploring the contradictions of our working lives, in fi ction, is perhaps a way of coming to terms with living in Absurdistan. Some, like Philip Norman’s Everyone’s Gone to the Moon, set on a ridiculously exuberant Sunday Times Magazine in the 1960s, are barely disguised autobiographies. Others, like Eric Clark’s Cold War thriller The Sleeper,


attempt to unravel the close ties between the work of the journalist and the work of the spy: following leads, amassing mountains of detail, occasionally betraying people or one’s


14 | theJournalist


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