Synopsis
When Fisher , the literary editor of the Conscience, is fired he goes quietly. But not as quietly as it seems. Before long he is back in journalism, thinly disguised as a "Media Consultant" wreaking havoc among his former employers. By the time he has finished, the Prime Minister and his boy friend are inextricably entwined with Great Britain's womens rugby team as they are hunted down by a motley gang of hacks orgainsed by Fisher in a war-torn banana republic about which no-newspaper wishes to know anything unless it is to do with sex, soap or the Royal Family. Tim Heald wrote a novel set amidst British National Press once before. The New York Times said that it was almost as good as that all tine Fleet Street classic, Evelyn Waugh's scoop." This time, attacking his subject with savage glee, he has gone one better. STOP PRESS is rude, angry, accurate and very funny. Present day newspaper editors and proprietors - take heed!
Reviews
Heald is a veteran English journalist who has written a number of novels that have not made it across the Atlantic, and several biographies of very British subjects. Stop Press (which is a Fleet Street term for late-breaking news) is a mildly dyspeptic look at the current state of newspaperdom in the Sceptered Isle, and its publishers talk hopefully of comparisons with Evelyn Waugh's classic Scoop. But what Waugh had above allAand essential for successful satireAis a deadpan consistency of viewpoint, and here Heald is all over the shop. His cynical editors and proprietors communicate the utmost contempt for their readers, but then Heald himself appears to share their view by offering his readers an utterly ramshackle plot, based on such hoary farcical elements as a man-hungry women's rugby team, a prime minister caught in a homosexual liaison and a press junket caught in the midst of a tinpot banana republic's revolution. These elements are scrambled together somehow, as the humble literary editor who is fired and becomes a consultant at the beginning gets to write his own ticket at the end, and various straw figures are set up and knocked down noisily. Despite the occasional glimmer of a satirical knife, and an even more occasional chuckle, this is the kind of book best left to a home readership. To a contemporary American reader, fresh from, say, something genuinely fresh and funny on the media world, like Turn of the Century, it seems merely anachronistic. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
