Stop Press

Heald is a veteran English journalist who has written a number of novels that have not made it across the Atlantic, and several biographies of very British subjects. Stop Press (which is a Fleet Street term for late-breaking news) is a mildly dyspeptic look at the current state of newspaperdom in the Sceptered Isle, and its publishers talk hopefully of comparisons with Evelyn Waugh's classic Scoop. But what Waugh had above all--and essential for successful satire--is a deadpan consistency of viewpoint, and here Heald is all over the shop. His cynical editors and proprietors communicate the utmost contempt for their readers, but then Heald himself appears to share their view by offering his readers an utterly ramshackle plot, based on such hoary farcical elements as a man-hungry women's rugby team, a prime minister caught in a homosexual liaison and a press junket caught in the midst of a tinpot banana republic's revolution. These elements are scrambled together somehow, as the humble literary editor who is fired and becomes a consultant at the beginning gets to write his own ticket at the end, and various straw figures are set up and knocked down noisily. Despite the occasional glimmer of a satirical knife, and an even more occasional chuckle, this is the kind of book best left to a home readership. To a contemporary American reader, fresh from, say, something genuinely fresh and funny on the media world, like Turn of the Century, it seems merely anachronistic. (Sept.)