Towards the End of the Morning (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

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Mr Salter saw he was not making his point clear. "Take a single example," he said. "Supposing you want to have dinner. Well, you go to a restaurant and do yourself proud, best of everything. Bill perhaps may be two pounds. Well, you put down five pounds for entertainment on your expenses. You've had a slap-up dinner, you're three pounds to the good, and everyone is satisfied."

First published in 1967 this could be seen as bit of a museum piece now in its fictional depiction of live in the media. I say media rather just a newspaper as it also touches on radio and TV. It does leave aside the hard news side of both broadcast and print media, but there are plenty of others who have trodden that path. John Dyson has the chance to be in a television studio, for a discussion on the ‘color problem’, on which he is supposed to be some kind of expert, he prepares for the appearance, informs everybody, drives with the family to see aunts and other relatives, calls all those he knows, prepares some notes, but when it comes to the evening of the big day, he drinks too much and if the effect is on the one hand salutary, for he is intoxicated and has lost all fear (while the other guests are febrile), on the other hand, he is clearly unable to contribute anything to the discussion, except ‘this is very interesting’ Its protagonists work to compile the miscellaneous, unimportant parts of the newspaper – the "nature notes" column, the religious "thought for the day", the crossword and so on. The paper seems sunk in a state of torpor, and the journalists' work is extremely dull. Feeling their lives and careers are stalled, they spend most of their day complaining about work and dreaming of better things. John Dyson, the lead protagonist, longs to work in television, and is at last given his chance towards the end of the book. However, fate seems determined to thwart him. The Observer drank in Auntie's, though I've forgotten whether it had any other name, and even who Auntie was. The Guardian had a foot in two camps. One was the Clachan, a rather undistinguished Younger's house grimly decorated with samples of the different tartans, where we drank our best bitter watched by a mysterious official of one of the print unions, who sat on his own at a corner of the bar every day from opening to closing time, wearing dark glasses and referred to in respectful whispers, but speaking to no one, apparently paid by either union or management just to sit there and drink all day.The real life, though, was in the narrow lanes just off the street, in Fetter Lane and Shoe Lane to the north, and Whitefriars Street and Bouverie Street to the south - in the grimy, exhausted-looking offices of the Mail and the Mirror, the News of the World, the Evening News and the Evening Standard. The Observer, to which I moved in 1962, occupied a muddled warren down in Tudor Street. Enough, perhaps, of the Catholic school of fiction. I graduated to the cool and elegant universe of Anthony Powell, in whose world the influence of the newspapers is relatively minimal. In fact, as it now seems to me, the absence of this influence is a limitation on his claim to have been describing English social reality. Surely Sir Magnus Donners, that tycoon of 1930s tycoons, should have been the ambitious and manipulative proprietor of at least one Fleet Street title? When Powell gets round to it, though, as he does in the 10th of his 12-novel cycle, he does not stint. Here is the port-soaked "Books" Bagshaw, in Books Do Furnish a Room:

Mrs. Mounce is an added complication to the picture (she ‘holds a cigarette in her special, sophisticated way, with the whole flat of the hand upraised beside the face, as if for a one handed salaam’) and when Tessa arrives in London to visit the man she loves, there is a stranger in the apartment and she is very scared that this could be a mistress…which she had tried to be for quite some time (Mrs. Mounce). George God strikes again’ and John is to travel to the Middle East, on a trip organized by an agency called Magic Carpet and arrive just the day before the television program is to air live and thus he could manage both endeavors, or so he thinks, for the trip to the Orient is a marvelous disaster (for the readers, it is the occasion to laugh out loud) for the journalist that are expected to write flattering reports… Their work lives are dull and their personal lives are dull. But what lifts this novel above the average is the writing; it has an ingenious, imaginative, glimmering edge to it, often most serious even when it is being so damn funny. It has a somewhat skewed approach to approaching the world through metaphor that so many other books of this author’s generation have (I’m thinking in particular of Malcolm Bradbury’s ‘The History Man’ here) where it’s almost like certain images come to dictate the existence of the characters beyond what we would normally expect in a realistic novel. It’s not only that metaphor is defined by the subjective experiences of the characters here, but it’s as though the literary device is an experience which is waiting out there in the world for these slightly dull and perfectly ordinary men to stumble across it.Orwell of course could be discouragingly pessimistic at times. But for light relief there was always Evelyn Waugh, who in his Decline and Fall had taught me that even original sin could have its lighter side. What could be funnier than the school sports-day at Dr Fagan's awful Molesworth-like establishment at Llanabba? The arrangements are being made: