Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A great comic novel, 19 April 2004
This book should come with a warning: don't read in public. Honestly, I have not read such a humourous book in a long time. It is laugh-out-loud funny.It's set in London at an unspecified newspaper during the declining years of Fleet Street. While it's a story about journalism and its struggle with changing work practises and the emerging "glitterati" of television broadcasting, it's essentially a comedy of manners. At the heart of the story are two journalists - the older, more uptight and ambitious John Dyson, who is anxious to find an easy route out of his mundane job, and the younger, more laidback and directionless Bob Bell, who doesn't have the courage to dump his girlfriend. The two of them work in the crossword and nature notes department but spend most of their time in the local drinking establishments complaining about their jobs and their workloads. Through their day to day struggles, Frayne is able to tackle some big themes - old school journalists coming to grips with an emerging tide of bright, young and worryingly efficient graduate trainees; newspaper journos trying to break into the much better paid field of broadcast journalism; the class system; how to get on the property ladder; and race relations - but he does it very deftly and with great humour. Towards the end of the Morning was written in 1967, but it holds up well as a modern classic. And Frayn's use of dialogue is spot on. He captures the art of conversation very well, often with more than three or four people speaking at once, very tricky if you've ever tried to do it yourself. It is perhaps Frayne's ear for dialogue that has made him such a gifted and much-praised playwright (Copenhagen and Noises Off are two of his more well known ones, although he has written 11 others). All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It would appeal to anyone looking for a fast-paced funny read.
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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Really funny and worth reading, 24 Oct 2000
By A Customer
I'm a journalist and although the world Michael Frayn describes is long gone, there were some moments of recognition even now. Fellow hacks will absolutely love the description of the press trip (and much else), but this isn't just a book for those in the trade: rather, it's a minor classic in the grand old tradition of British farce. Michael Frayn is extremely good at slipping in to other people's voices and the main character, Dyson, is one of the few literary examples of journalist as everyman. Read it, you'll love it.
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43 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The classic comic Fleet Street Novel, 14 Jan 2002
By A Customer
Written in 1967 (at that time, the present day), the book is set in a Fleet Street which no longer exists. Wapping has long since superseded Grub Street, both in work practices and in technology. Frayn, in hindsight, gives us a fascinating insight into newspaper journalism as it was, not as it is now.
The setting is a monolithic and nameless Fleet Street Daily. Dyson, 40's, a married, mortgaged dreamer and father of two, is head of a backwater covering nature notes, crosswords and "yesteryear". His staff is Bob, an aimless 29 year old single graduate and old Eddy Moulton, nearer the end of his days than he realises and compiler of the "100 Years Ago This Day" column.
Dyson dreams of recognition, wider success and celebrity status but seems unable to escape the lethargy of the work, despite attempting occasional, febrile bursts of it. Bob's chief office activity is eating toffees from a bag in his desk and writing vacuous love letters to his young girlfriend Tess at her finishing school. Eddy spends his days poring over yellowed back numbers and lives wholly in the past.
Life has continued in this way for aeons. What little work done is confined to the late morning, before the staff repair to the pub for the obligatory journalistic liquid lunch and gossip with the other staff hacks. The editor, a distant, shadowy figure, has never been seen by anyone. He communicates, Howard Hughes - like, by note. At one point, he attempts to sack the pictures editor, the embittered Reg. Mounce, using an unsigned memo. Reg., believing this to be a joke perpetrated by his peers, ignores his dismissal, carries on with his job and is still employed weeks later.
The afternoon passes in the customary beery trance until the deadline approaches. In Dyson's
department of course, this has no effect whatsoever, given the timeless nature of the copy. Their only indication that the deadline has passed is the distant rumble of the presses below.
This routine is set to continue for ever, until three things happen. Eddy Moulton dies quietly at his desk, undiscovered for hours; Dyson is asked to appear on late night television with a panel of experts and Bob's girlfriend arrives with marriage written in capitals at the top of her agenda. The comic pace is fast and furious. Eddy's death creates a vacancy for Erskine, a talented, capable and laconic graduate who, within weeks, has taken over the department by stealth.
Dyson has too many pre-TV appearance gins in the hospitality suite and, on air, can say nothing but "how fascinating", again and again. Helpless Bob, loved by Tess, mothered by Mounce's wife and platonically and confusedly desired by Mrs. Dyson, progresses not one of these relationships and fails to take his one chance to escape. It is Erskine, a chilly precursor of the '80s yuppie, who finally wins the rewards.
Frayn's background in journalism as a Guardian and Observer columnist is clearly on show throughout. He uses more than just pale shades of his former colleagues, all finely drawn and
convincingly set in their now vanished dusty Fleet Street offices. How hard it is to imagine any one of them surviving today's frenetic newspaper world! The fast paced, witty narrative carries the reader compulsively from one comic episode to the next, right through to the hilarious climax. Read this accomplished, sophisticated novel. You will not be disappointed.
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