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

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Frayn seems at home regardless of genre - stage plays, drama, and here genuine but gentle English comedy. To the extent the book is about anything of general interest, I suppose it recounts how we all fiddle with daily trivia as Rome burns around us. What else can anyone do but fall in line with silly, archaic aspirations, suffer annoying neighbours, maintain peace with one’s colleagues, and avoid drinking too much at lunch. The mysteries of what goes on in the editor’s inner sanctum, much less the rest of the world, are unfathomable. He looked at his watch in the firelight. It was a quarter to twelve. Well, it felt like four. And four and a quarter hours later, when it actually was four, and the bedclothes both above and below were a mere conglomerate heap, and Tessa’s strapping behind had pushed right across the bed, and Bob was cold and stiff from hand to foot, and had neither been asleep nor awake for a moment, it felt as though the solar system had finally run down and stopped, and closed off the ever-renewing spring of pure, fresh time for good and all...’

The sole exception I can call to mind is PG Wodehouse, who started out as a penny-a-liner on the Globe and seems to have found journalism to be innocent fun. Bertie Wooster never misses a chance to mention his article on "What The Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing", which appeared in his Aunt Dahlia's own magazine Milady's Boudoir, and to which he deprecatingly refers as "my 'piece', as we journalists call it". Psmith, in Psmith Journalist, takes over a small magazine of domesticity in New York, named Cosy Moments, and transforms it briefly into a campaigning, reforming and crime-fighting organ. His slogan when confronted by those who would intimidate him is: "Cosy Moments cannot be muzzled." This motto has been inscribed on the wall above my keyboard for many years. 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: This reader has had the chance to read Spies by Michael Frayn http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/08/s... and has been enthused by it, therefore the fact that Towards the End of the Morning is such a spectacular beano should not be a surprise, except while Spies is just about as ‘serious and grave’ as it could be, Towards the end is often hilarious. The story concerns a bourgeois idiot and other characters around him. Vacuous existence abounds here. The women are unhappy and seek something else. The men "don't mind really, whatever you say..." Docile, unquestioning fools, dead fish going with the flow, a preening egotistical nonentity. 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.

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Yes, well, that seems to put the profession nicely in its place, and indeed in its context. I read those words when I was a schoolboy in Cambridge in the early 1960s and had already decided that only journalism would do. in the wind for Fleet Street, personified in the book by Erskine Morris, a languorously ambitious young As the author explains in the introduction, the novel is based on his own experiences as a journalist and he even indicates the real life man on whom John Dyson – probably the second most important character in the story – is based, given that the newspaperman had passed away at the time when this segment has been written… Some review or other of this book mentioned "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" by Orwell. That is a good reference point for this work. The cover review quotes of this book mention jokes and humour. I can see the parts of the book where I'm supposed to laugh. I managed a couple of stifled grunts. I wonder if my reaction to the book is my own cynicism or simply the gap in the cultures of the 1970s where things were somehow still "jolly" and 2017 marked by war all the time, the growing gap between the people and the capitalist class and the shift to the populist right. The book was written when the defeat of fascism in Europe was still fresh in the memory and post-modern capitalism was still a young beast. In any case, the literature of old Fleet Street was to a very considerable extent written by journalists and for journalists. Most reporters I know regard Scoop as a work of pitiless realism rather than antic fantasy. The cap fitted, and they wore it, and with a lop-sided grin of pride, at that. Perhaps this assists us in answering the age-old question: why does the profession of journalism have such a low reputation? The answer: because it has such a bad press.

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). Fictional account of journalists working on Fleet Street. I liked it, don't get me wrong but Frayn's updated introduction was more enjoyable than the whole book. The first couple of chapters were fine concentrating on the journalists on Fleet street & gave a pretty good rendition of how newspapers worked - not to mention the long pub lunches, but the end pretty much petered out with the domestic lives of the main characters, and recounting of John's airline screwup of his Persian Gulf trip. I guess I was hoping for more action, more journalistic action. Dialogue and characterisation were good. The end was just a bit meh. Having worked at Fairfax in the 80's this seems incredibly slow, almost Victorian & tame to me, except for the guy dying at his desk and noone noticing (which could have easily happened in the Fairfax reading room)!. In any case I really wanted to give this 4 stars - the writing was good enough, there just wasn't enough plot. Towards The End Of The Morning is a 1967 satirical novel by Michael Frayn about journalists working on a British newspaper during the heyday of Fleet Street.

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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."

John Dyson Invites the surveyor that lives in the area for dinner, ‘but whatever it was the man surveyed, it was done mostly through the bottom of a glass’ and later on, there would be hopes that maybe Bob will move nearby, once he is engaged with Tessa – here there was a misunderstanding, for the two young people (he is twenty nine, and I am not sure if we know what her age is) had been invited for dinner, and during that, the two sons of the hosts had had an argument and in the confusion, generated by the noise and misapprehension, it seemed that the two of them intend to get married. Various members of the staff emerged from Hand and Ball Passage during the last dark hour of the morning, walked with an air of sober responsibility towards the main entrance, greeted the commissionaire and vanished upstairs in the lift to telephone their friends and draw their expenses before going out again to have lunch." Indeed, the under signed has had a brief flirt with this profession, for he met Michael Meyers from Newsweek (and is proud to have been included in the article on the fall of Ceausescu, about three decades ago, when he was a hero of the revolution), then James Wilde from TIME, some others from Radio Sweden and various media channels and could see the big difference between the budgets and operations of those with television networks and the rest of the journalistic crowd, who had had lesser material, financial means We mostly worked at a rather gentlemanly pace by the standards of today's journalists. We didn't have quite such a limitless acreage of newsprint to fill, and we hadn't yet got bogged down in the endless union negotiations that darkened the last days of Fleet Street, before Rupert Murdoch side-stepped them, and in 1986 broke out of that increasingly hobbled and embittered little world to the brutal simplicities of Wapping.Bob felt himself swooping down again into the great soft darkness of sleep. Somewhere down there he stubbed himself against an ill-defined but hard mass of fact, and brought himself up to the surface to examine it…’ 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. 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. A central theme of the book is Dyson's struggle against what he sees as encroaching entropy – indeed, the book was published in the United States under the title Against Entropy. No one, for some reason, has ever been able to remember the title of my novel Towards The End Of the Morning. By the common consent of almost everyone who has mentioned it to me since it was first published in 1967, it seems to have been rechristened Your Fleet Street Novel. What surprises me a little is that anyone can still remember what the phrase Fleet Street once signified.

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