Towards The End Of The Morning – Michael Frayn

I spent my whole life working in newspapers, both as a reporter and later as a sub-editor, and over the years I’ve heard any number of tales which amused me and made me laugh. But as always such tales are not quite as amusing to those who – in a manner of speaking – ‘weren’t there’ as in ‘you had to be there’.

I also know that lawyers, coppers and medics and I don’t doubt even accountants have some anecdotes related to their profession to tell which have them all roaring with laughter when they get together – no doubt after several trips to the bar and back – which might perhaps amuse the rest of us non-lawyers, non-coppers and non-medics rather less.

Admittedly, for many ‘civilians’ there is supposedly, or perhaps was, something of the Wild West about journalism, though this, now retired, hack (in my books ‘hack’ is certainly not a pejorative term) can confirm that that reputation is also largely spurious, though one perpetuated by the industry itself.

When the pittance many newspapers and broadcasters pay their young employees is justified on the grounds that ‘journalism is a vocation’, you really should wake up and take note that something very fishy is going on.

The trouble is that young starry-eyed teens and twentysomethings initially buy into the bullshit, and by the time they realise they’ve been had, the mortgage, overdraft, three kids and perhaps even alimony payments show it all

in a different light. But it’s too late, dear hearts, too late.

Like every other job, journalism can get very dull indeed if you end up working for the wrong employer. For every ‘journalist’ interviewing government ministers, rooting out financial shenanigans and reporting from a war zone, there are several thousands who day in, day out spend their time writing dull features, boring headlines and tedious captions for Trout And Salmon or Tunnels And Tunneller.

In fact, the heyday of ‘the Press’ and the world of ‘get it right and get it first’, the mavericks who would sell their grandmother to ‘get a story’ and the antics of Ben Hecht’s cutthroat reporters in The Front Page was the mid to late 19th century and to the mid-20th century. Then television began to come of age and the decline in print circulation inexorably began.

Worse, now, in the third decade of the 21st century what with digital this n’ that, clickbait lists and loose – and wholly spurious – talk about ‘citizen journalism’, life in ‘the media’ might no longer have the – equally spurious – glamour it was once thought to have. The internet and online news service have seen to that.

Yet many are still in thrall to ‘reporters’, newspapers, journalists and all the rest, so when they see a novel such as Michael Frayn’s Towards The End Of The Morning billed as ‘the best / funniest novel about journalism’ they sit up and take note.

In fact, it is not the best / funniest novel about journalism. The gold standard and so far the unbeatable champ is Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. All other novels and plays about journalism, both print and broadcast, must be matched against Scoop, and sadly Frayn’s novel can, in my view, simply be filed at best under ‘Waugh lite’.

Actually, Waugh’s novel wasn’t really about journalism as such: his hero William Boot, Boot’s employer the Daily Beast, the Beast’s owner Lord Copper, Mr Salter the managing editor who would prefer to edit the children’s page and others are foremost the subjects of his humour and the ‘journalism’ aspect it almost coincidental.

Similarly, in Waugh’s Sword Of Honour trilogy the British Army was the subject of his humour – the three novels were not in themselves ‘about’ the British Army. In one sense Waugh’s ‘vision’ and ‘Weltanschauung’ were unique and natural. They evolved from his, apparently not altogether sunny character. But boy was he funny.

Frayn, unfortunately, most certainly has a sense of the absurd but he has no such unique vision. He comes up with some good lines, but his humour is just a tad forced and not just now and then. One of Waugh’s gifts was a succinct and economical writing style in which he expressed his often dark humour: he never laboured a joke. Frayn does labour jokes repeatedly.

The second objection to describing Towards The End Of The Morning as ‘the best novel about journalism’ is that although a newspaper and some of its officers feature in the novel, it is not about journalism or the newspaper at all. Both are as incidental to the novel as ‘a dinner party’, ‘having your girlfriend to stay’ and ‘a frustrated older woman trying to seduce a younger, reluctant man’. In short, the novel is ‘not about journalism’.

There are many chapters and scenes which could be a part of any English comedy of manners of a certain age. In Frayn’s case that age is the early 1960s, an era which existed more than 60 years ago and sadly it is dated (though, of course, that is not Frayn’s fault).

Finally, where Towards The End Of The Morning comes unstuck is that it is essentially just a series of vignettes loosely stitched together rather than a novel with a unifying theme. Individually, those vignettes might amuse, though for this reader rather too many of ‘the jokes’ overstayed their welcome and began to pall more than a little.

Frayn is, perhaps, now better known as a comic dramatist than as a novelist, and the direction his career was to take him is apparent in the chapter – the vignette – where one character does not want it known by ‘the charwoman’ that his girlfriend is staying with him.

There follows a somewhat unconvincing series of comings and goings which would be at home in a farce, and are not very funny at all. Overall the novel meanders to its conclusion, an ending which is no ‘conclusion’ at all. The novel simply ends.