SCOOP: A Novel About Journalists, by Evelyn Waugh
He's a notably elegant writer of scabrous wit and very politically incorrect views, and this is one of his funniest novels. It's about between-the-wars English snobbery, newspapers like the Daily Express (here the Daily Beast), and the competing wiles of the western powers in a war of their own creation in black Africa (modelled on the Abyssinia of the 1930s - now Ethiopia plus Eritrea). It is both dated (his own snobbery, the utterly changed technology of news-gathering) and spot-on (the media's conduct, motives, greed and incompetence, and the gullibility of decent people). Incidentally it's the book the gives us the expression "Up to a point, Lord Copper" as a polite rejoinder when someone's asserted to you something that's actually bollocks. Evelyn Waugh's books aren't all predominantly comic: there's the elegaic Brideshead Revisited (recently done a great disservice on British TV by a revival that couldn't hold a candle to the 1970s version), and, much the best, his tremendous war trilogy Sword of Honour (consisting of Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender).
FINGERSMITH, by Sarah Waters
I haven't read all her novels so I shouldn't say that this is the best, but I can't imagine it being bettered. Her early terrain was Dickens-period England, and she's shiveringly good at it. It's usually pointless to try to do Dickens, and ends in pallid pastiche, but this is wonderfully achieved and compellingly authentic throughout. It's also gripping with a plot that twists so cleverly, so vividly, so plausibly yet unpredictably. For its prose, its plot and its intelligence, it's a book I can't imagine not enthralling you. Sarah Waters was born the year Blonde On Blonde came out.
On a Waugh note, I'd also recommend 'Handful of Dust' - a delightfully odd and dark ending which shouldn't fit the main story at all (it was originally written seperately) but somehow does.
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