Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #132444 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-19
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Synopsis
This tale is set in the crossword and nature-notes department of an obscure national newspaper during the declining years of Fleet Street.

Customer Reviews

Great writing, entertaining read
I didn't get the outbursts of laughter of some of the other reviewers but I did thoroughly enjoy Michael Frayn's lively writing style and found the book an entertaining mix of satirizing the vanities and follies of human behaviour but done in a kindly way that made you sympathize with the characters. I can imagine that if you are a journalist there would be things about the descriptions of working for a newspaper that would give extra enjoyment.
I think that this book would probably appeal even more to men than women rather like PG Wodehouse.

Entertaining in parts but inconsistent
Lets get this straight. Very little of the action of this book takes place in Fleet Street; it is mainly concerned with the travails of a couple of sub-editors trying to find direction in life. The characters are well sketched but the plotlines (such as they are) appear flimsy and ephemeral. The central characters are not particularly likeable, Dyson is suffering a midlife crisis which manifests itself in self-obssessive behaviour, and has assistant, Bob, is a weakwilled nobody, dominated by his neighbour and fiancee. The book would be improved if more focus was placed on the activities of the newspaper as this would at least differentiate it from far superior comic novels such as Sharpe's "Porterhouse Blue" or Amis's "Lucky Jim". The closing chapters cover travel-nightmare territory done much better in Lodge's "Small World" whereas the character of Morris, who joins the cast far too late, appears to have been copied directly from Wodehouse's "Psmith Journalist". Pretty average.

A great comic novel
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.