Towards the End of the Morning
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"She took one or two of them down and turned the pages over, trying to persuade herself she was reading them. But the meanings of words seemed to dart away from her like a shoal of minnows as she advanced upon them, and she felt more uneasy still."--Towards the End of the Morning (1967) by Michael Frayn |
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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.
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.
Towards was Frayn's third book after The Tin Men and The Russian Interpreter, and is probably based on his experiences at The Observer from 1962 to 1968.
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.
