Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Council Estate

Before the internet in Britain, there was a thing called Fleet Street. This was as much a culture as a location. It sat culturally and geographically midway between the commercial city of London and the seat of government in Westminster. It produced something called newspapers, an artefact that had political and commercial importance. But it was adept neither at managing nor governing its own affairs. It was trapped by its technology and its traditions and was slowly suffocating. But while it lasted it produced characters as intriguing as those of Dickens; in fact most of them would have felt quite at home in Dickens’s London.

And Michael Frayn can do cultural comedy just about as good as Dickens. Towards the End of Morning (one of several titles the book has accumulated) rates with The Pickwick Papers in its appreciation of the idiosyncrasies of a passing culture seen from the inside. Like Dickens, Frayn was a journalist in his youth who also saw the limitations of the profession. And like The Pickwick Papers, his book is an institutionally posthumous record of the days when the only thing Fleet Street had little interest in was itself and its painful forthcoming demise.

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.

Journalists, like philosophers, pretend to know a great deal. In fact, if they’re good at their jobs, if they “write like an angel”, they need to know very little about anything. At least that was the case once upon a time. Perhaps now they don’t even need to do that. Since they’ve all moved out of Fleet Street to make way for the likes of Goldman Sachs the Third Estate seems to have gone even further downmarket.

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