Towards The End Of The Morning is a 1967 satirical novel by Michael Frayn about journalists working on a British newspaper during the heyday of Fleet Street. Indeed, the under signed has had a brief flirt with this profession, for he met Michael Meyers from Newsweek (and is proud to have been included in the article on the fall of Ceausescu, about three decades ago, when he was a hero of the revolution), then James Wilde from TIME, some others from Radio Sweden and various media channels and could see the big difference between the budgets and operations of those with television networks and the rest of the journalistic crowd, who had had lesser material, financial means Frayn seems at home regardless of genre - stage plays, drama, and here genuine but gentle English comedy. To the extent the book is about anything of general interest, I suppose it recounts how we all fiddle with daily trivia as Rome burns around us. What else can anyone do but fall in line with silly, archaic aspirations, suffer annoying neighbours, maintain peace with one’s colleagues, and avoid drinking too much at lunch. The mysteries of what goes on in the editor’s inner sanctum, much less the rest of the world, are unfathomable. In any case, the literature of old Fleet Street was to a very considerable extent written by journalists and for journalists. Most reporters I know regard Scoop as a work of pitiless realism rather than antic fantasy. The cap fitted, and they wore it, and with a lop-sided grin of pride, at that. Perhaps this assists us in answering the age-old question: why does the profession of journalism have such a low reputation? The answer: because it has such a bad press.

In Frayn's two novels in the sixth decade of that century, the lure of television is already beginning to exert its anti-magic. The mindlessness of the opinion poll and the reader-survey is coming to replace news and analysis. The reporters and editors are beginning to think about mortgages and pensions. The editor is a cipher. I do not think that there will again be a major novel, flattering or unflattering, in which a reporter is the protagonist. Or if there is, he or she will be a blogger or some other species of cyber-artist, working from home and conjuring the big story from the vastness of electronic space. Mr Salter saw he was not making his point clear. "Take a single example," he said. "Supposing you want to have dinner. Well, you go to a restaurant and do yourself proud, best of everything. Bill perhaps may be two pounds. Well, you put down five pounds for entertainment on your expenses. You've had a slap-up dinner, you're three pounds to the good, and everyone is satisfied." Die Tatsache, dass ich eine Übersetzung dieses Buches im Regal stehen hatte, hat mich jahrelang davon abgehalten, es zu lesen, was im Nachhinein betrachtet nicht nur Unsinn, sondern auch ein schwerer Fehler war. Trotzdem würde ich unbedingt zum Original raten.He looked at his watch in the firelight. It was a quarter to twelve. Well, it felt like four. And four and a quarter hours later, when it actually was four, and the bedclothes both above and below were a mere conglomerate heap, and Tessa’s strapping behind had pushed right across the bed, and Bob was cold and stiff from hand to foot, and had neither been asleep nor awake for a moment, it felt as though the solar system had finally run down and stopped, and closed off the ever-renewing spring of pure, fresh time for good and all...’ Yes, well, that seems to put the profession nicely in its place, and indeed in its context. I read those words when I was a schoolboy in Cambridge in the early 1960s and had already decided that only journalism would do. Its protagonists work to compile the miscellaneous, unimportant parts of the newspaper – the "nature notes" column, the religious "thought for the day", the crossword and so on. The paper seems sunk in a state of torpor, and the journalists' work is extremely dull. Feeling their lives and careers are stalled, they spend most of their day complaining about work and dreaming of better things. John Dyson, the lead protagonist, longs to work in television, and is at last given his chance towards the end of the book. However, fate seems determined to thwart him. He possessed that opportune facility for turning out several thousand words on any subject whatever at the shortest possible notice: politics: sport: books: finance: science: art: fashion - as he himself said, "War, Famine, Pestilence or Death on a Pale Horse". All were equal when it came to Bagshaw's typewriter. He would take on anything, and - to be fair - what he produced, even off the cuff, was no worse than what was to be read most of the time. You never wondered how on earth the stuff had ever managed to be printed." The sole exception I can call to mind is PG Wodehouse, who started out as a penny-a-liner on the Globe and seems to have found journalism to be innocent fun. Bertie Wooster never misses a chance to mention his article on "What The Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing", which appeared in his Aunt Dahlia's own magazine Milady's Boudoir, and to which he deprecatingly refers as "my 'piece', as we journalists call it". Psmith, in Psmith Journalist, takes over a small magazine of domesticity in New York, named Cosy Moments, and transforms it briefly into a campaigning, reforming and crime-fighting organ. His slogan when confronted by those who would intimidate him is: "Cosy Moments cannot be muzzled." This motto has been inscribed on the wall above my keyboard for many years.

The story begins with a premature and premonitory nightfall, and I suppose that with hindsight the book does look a bit like a valediction: though in the case of Fleet Street itself, as it turned out, the darkness that settled in was not going to lift in time for lunch. A central theme of the book is Dyson's struggle against what he sees as encroaching entropy – indeed, the book was published in the United States under the title Against Entropy. John Dyson has the chance to be in a television studio, for a discussion on the ‘color problem’, on which he is supposed to be some kind of expert, he prepares for the appearance, informs everybody, drives with the family to see aunts and other relatives, calls all those he knows, prepares some notes, but when it comes to the evening of the big day, he drinks too much and if the effect is on the one hand salutary, for he is intoxicated and has lost all fear (while the other guests are febrile), on the other hand, he is clearly unable to contribute anything to the discussion, except ‘this is very interesting’Bob tried to remember why he hadn’t told her...But he couldn’t really remember the reason. It was already lost – part of the jetsam of discarded immemorabilia which disappeared astern all the time. From hour to hour one’s life slipped away into the haze, before one had really looked at any of it properly... Some review or other of this book mentioned "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" by Orwell. That is a good reference point for this work. The cover review quotes of this book mention jokes and humour. I can see the parts of the book where I'm supposed to laugh. I managed a couple of stifled grunts. I wonder if my reaction to the book is my own cynicism or simply the gap in the cultures of the 1970s where things were somehow still "jolly" and 2017 marked by war all the time, the growing gap between the people and the capitalist class and the shift to the populist right. The book was written when the defeat of fascism in Europe was still fresh in the memory and post-modern capitalism was still a young beast. This fabulous, but alas forgotten (it only has a few lines on Wikipedia) Magnum opus describes the shenanigans, procrastination, heavy drinking, leisurely pace of the life of journalists decades ago, in the glory (is that the appropriate term to use I wonder) days of Fleet Street, before the catastrophic years when many have been eliminated from the market, leaving tabloids and some extremist media outfits (Murdoch empire) to rule the arena… in the wind for Fleet Street, personified in the book by Erskine Morris, a languorously ambitious young There was always, also, an interest in guessing whether Frayn had "set" it all at either the Observer or the Guardian, which in those days were separate institutions. (Malcolm Muggeridge's journalism novel Picture Palace had been too transparent in this regard, enraging his employers, the then-Manchester Guardian management, who obtained an injunction preventing its publication.) In the introduction to the new edition, Frayn says that it was a touch of both. The paper is never given a name, but it's in any case obviously not the Observer because it comes out every day. A possible clue, for addicts and cognoscenti, is contained on the very cover of the new edition which drops an entire word out of the title of the novel, and rather metaphysically offers it as Towards the End of Morning. The Guardian is no longer so celebrated for its misprints but there will always be those of us who are nostalgic for the days when it was, and when the opera critic Phillip Hope Wallace, for example, could wake up to find that he had reviewed last night's Covent Garden performance of Doris Godunov.

Enough, perhaps, of the Catholic school of fiction. I graduated to the cool and elegant universe of Anthony Powell, in whose world the influence of the newspapers is relatively minimal. In fact, as it now seems to me, the absence of this influence is a limitation on his claim to have been describing English social reality. Surely Sir Magnus Donners, that tycoon of 1930s tycoons, should have been the ambitious and manipulative proprietor of at least one Fleet Street title? When Powell gets round to it, though, as he does in the 10th of his 12-novel cycle, he does not stint. Here is the port-soaked "Books" Bagshaw, in Books Do Furnish a Room: The story concerns a bourgeois idiot and other characters around him. Vacuous existence abounds here. The women are unhappy and seek something else. The men "don't mind really, whatever you say..." Docile, unquestioning fools, dead fish going with the flow, a preening egotistical nonentity. As the author explains in the introduction, the novel is based on his own experiences as a journalist and he even indicates the real life man on whom John Dyson – probably the second most important character in the story – is based, given that the newspaperman had passed away at the time when this segment has been written…

We mostly worked at a rather gentlemanly pace by the standards of today's journalists. We didn't have quite such a limitless acreage of newsprint to fill, and we hadn't yet got bogged down in the endless union negotiations that darkened the last days of Fleet Street, before Rupert Murdoch side-stepped them, and in 1986 broke out of that increasingly hobbled and embittered little world to the brutal simplicities of Wapping.