Towards the End of the Morning

Michael Frayn's 1967 Fleet Street novel draws unavoidable comparison with Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop", and that it comes off looking pretty good speaks volumes for Frayn's talent. It tells the story of John Dyson, a middling newspaper man slipping towards the end of his youth and towards the end of his foundering career. It also parallels the end of British print media in its traditional form as it gradually gave way to Americanization, i.e. the unavoidable slip towards television. But Frayn's portrait is a fair one: he isn't suggesting the lager-soaked world of British print was any better than what replaced it. He exploits the humorous potential of both. His dramatization of British class-based social anxiety and the irritating bullishness of American upstarts are both spot-on. Frayn's introduction to this edition interestingly explains the origins of the novel and the actual people and experiences on which it is based.