Michael Frayn’s Toward the End of the Morning is a send-up of journalists and their columns, copies, local interest bits, and endless demands for crossword puzzles.  The novel is mildly funny but terribly dated.  Released in 1967 it reads as a history of well-educated, middle class London and its efforts at gentrification, integration, journalization, and fornication.  No internet was yet in sight and no one seemed to work too hard for the late-breaking news; sex was discreet but assumed; lunch was taken every day with the same gang at the same cafe, always with one beer too many; and the days’ work always ended at the same cafe for a pint of bitters or glass of whiskey before heading home.

I am sure when this novel came out it was riotously funny. It is still entertaining, with engaging characters, like the knee-nibbling neighbor and the poor guy who gets nibbled and himself nibbles sugar with a spoon and wonders why he’s getting chubby.  The characters, disheveled and out of sorts and hankering for something if only they could figure out what, never make a move except when shoved by someone else. Sometimes the shove is hard, sometimes gentle, and change does come — movement overcoming conflict, important to a novel –  but it is not the change that any one of them really wants.

I read another office-disaster type novel, Pulpy and Midge, set in modern Canada. The sex in that novel is more overt than in Towards the End of Morning but no more frequent, the drinking as ample, and the accomplishments of the office as minor.  What is most different from office life in the 1960s is that the pace of modern life is much faster, more frenetic. A cliche but true: our present office space suffers from a frenzied speeding up of time. Is this due to fax, email, internet, blackberry, iPhone, etc?  It is another cliche but just as true, that the inventions meant to free us tie us more firmly to the ever-speedier treadmill of work.   And while in a 1960s office, time was wasted by staring out the window at the passers-by below, today we turn to our Facebook page, and ignore the real life outside altogether.