A witty and entertaining debut about two very different worlds of journalism
Newspaper folk are prodigiously rewarding targets for satire, as novelists from Evelyn Waugh (Scoop) to Michael Frayn (Towards the End of the Morning) and Andrew Martin (Bilton) have discovered, and it helps, as countless columns attest, that so many of them seem delightedly in thrall to their caricatured selves. Ask a journalist if he or she minds being perceived as an ego-driven, rivalrous, opportunistic, plonk-swilling word machine and you're more likely to get an invitation to the wine bar than a letter from their solicitor. Ruthlessness and venality, it is tacitly suggested, are the inevitable bedfellows of the unstoppable determination to nail the story.
This, of course, is a caricature in itself and one that has begun to acquire the added lustre of a period piece as the fabled excesses of Fleet Street recede into the distance. In her highly entertaining first novel, Annalena McAfee ? herself a former journalist and founding editor of the Guardian Review ? evokes two distinct eras and styles of journalism, that of fearless frontline reportage and that of its successor, style-oriented, celebrity-obsessed features coverage. Governed by sharply opposing principles and priorities, they have little in common; but by The Spoiler's conclusion, we begin to get the picture that both are equally viable candidates for the museum shelf.
It is 1997, and the internet is only just beginning to make its presence felt among the staff of broadsheet newspaper The Monitor. For one editor, the web is for losers, "Citizens' Band radio for pseuds and geeks"; and for Tamara Sim, one of the novel's two leading ladies, it's as likely to dominate the future as unisex silver jumpsuits and time travel. But Tamara has more pressing problems than the technological revolution: desperate to escape from her precarious employment writing top ten lists for the paper's downmarket Psst! section ("Corkers to Porkers ? From Fab to Flab" is one of her triumphs), she dreams of ascending to the penthouse corridors of its cerebral stablemate S*nday, more likely to set before its discerning readers Sontag and Steiner than slappers and suntans.
In a sudden and unexpected development, her elevation seems possible. Commissioned out of the blue to write a 4,000-word profile of the septuagenarian Honor Tait, a much-feted correspondent whose career has encompassed Nuremberg, Normandy, Hungary in 1956 and the Korean war, all Tamara has to do is keep her nerve and gloss over the fact that her acquaintance with Tait's oeuvre begins and ends with a skimpy set text on her Media Studies course, and that she's not quite sure what the Cultural Revolution was. It is not, alas, as easy as it looks. Their first encounter, an interview that will have all journalists squirming in recognition of those moments when one isn't quite as prepared as one would have liked ("Really? Fantastic!" breathes an inattentive Tamara at precisely the moment Tait is telling her about the death of teenage American soldiers in Korea), is a disaster of mutual incomprehension and hostility, and the piece seems sunk. What Tamara needs is scandal, and plenty of it.
The ensuing race to the deadline is a pacy affair that alternates between the hapless Tamara's frequent recourse to her thesaurus (S*nday, she reckons, is just the place to scatter words such as "chthonic" and "hermeneutic") and Tait's grim determination to keep her would-be profiler at bay, particularly from her rather murky private life. But Tait herself is quite aware of her fading powers; where once she tracked down Franco and dallied with Cocteau, now she finds herself surrounded by lackeys and lickspittles and is occasionally mistaken for Martha Gellhorn, while her pieces are returned by the New Statesman. Despite the fathoms that separate them, McAfee makes much sport of the parallels between the two journalists, who are both obsessive revisers of their own material. "Such stuffy, sermonising prose," thinks Tamara, reading Tait's cuttings. "Not quite Watergate," thinks Tait, reading Tamara's.
The "spoiler", when it finally comes, involves the high-risk, high-stakes playing off of one newspaper against another, with various casualties left lying around the newsroom. But by firmly placing her story in the recent but, in other respects, unimaginably distant past, McAfee has given it greater and wittier resonance. Midway through, "a young Bonaparte" of an online seer lectures the journalists on the shape of things to come: "In the future ? maybe two years, maybe five, down the line ? The Monitor will no longer merely be a daily national newspaper with weekly supplements; it will be a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week multi-platform information and comment outlet with a global readership, straddling borders and time zones." Immediately, one of her audience pipes up: "What about our four-day week?"
There's little doubt in the reader's mind that one school of journalism deserves rather more mourning than the other; but there is nonetheless room to shed a small tear for the speedily vanishing world of boozy lunches, bar-room brawls and expenses forms that bears more resemblance to the world of fiction than to hard-nosed investigative reportage. "The golden age is over," muses Tamara, but one of her clearer-eyed colleagues is quick to correct her: "The gravy train has been derailed, you mean."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/24/spoiler-annalena-mcafee-clark-review
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