The Non-Herd Music

Christopher Hitchens cited Kingsley Amis's Girl, 20 as equal in laughter stature to Evelyn Waugh's routinely proclaimed Scoop and Michael Frayn's invisibly unproclaimed The Tin Men in a December 2005 Guardian piece on the greatest comic explorations of the British press (the Guardian is, by the way, refracted into the Custodian in the Amis book). I was with the timeless herd in my appreciation of Waugh's book, but I thought Frayn's masterpiece was pretty much written for my eyes only, never having seen even a passing mention of it in the many years since I first discovered its vast (which is to say microscopic) absurdity on my own. I have now read Mr. Amis's book. Mr. Hitchens is correct. It deserves to stand with the others. How the British press, and the media generally, has withstood these three books' very existence I cannot say.