If you are regularly involved in one form of literary or editorial work or another, book reviewing tends to creep up on you. As time goes by, you see so many manuscripts of would-be novels, drafts of aspirant poetry, disappointing commissioned articles, earnest monographs on marginal topics, supernumerary studies of well-trampled authors, self-exculpating autobiographies, trite reiterations of genre fiction, and navel-gazing and diarrhoeic monologues of angst and urban transition, that it's hard to maintain a spirit of intellectual inquiry, let alone patience.
And yet we all know that treasures come along unexpectedly – such as JD Salinger's
The Catcher in the Rye or Richard Adams'
Watership Down. Out of the blue, as it were, an editor or a publisher has a best-seller or a classic on their hands. Make the wrong choice and regret it forever, financially and perhaps even reputationally. Things may seem at less of a risk for the jobbing book reviewer, but even this humble corner of the editorial and publishing world is a minefield of potential hazards.
The very familiarity one has with a field, or a genre, or an author's output can obscure or deaden any sense of originality. Sharp turnover deadlines and procrustean copy-lengths aggravate the pressure. By-lines can jump up and bite you, especially if your email or institutional affiliation is broadcast beside your name. By the time the review is written and published, regrets are in vain and you can't take it back.
As a result, a common practice for some exponents of the reviewing art write two versions: the one they would really like to have written (with all the splutterings and spleen, carping and pedantry, and suppressed envy) and the one they know they have to deliver to the gawping public (usually a small coterie of the marketing department, the author and their friends).
Such a process enables the noble reviewer to take breath, check potentially libellous comments and breach-of-copyright infringements, customise it to journal house-style, fact-check and sub-edit if there's time, accept the inevitable compromises about the research you really should have carried out, and decide whether, once again, to reflect on whether the whole thing has been a waste of time and gets in the way of the creative writing they really should have been doing. For a really well-informed review can at best demonstrate even more knowledge of a subject than that of the author of the reviewed material: breakthroughs in neuroscience, the latest Carnegie Medal winner, the controversial political biography, the music of Wagner.
Enough knowledge in fact to suggest (and this really must be a common experience) to the reviewer that, if they had the time, they might well do better themselves. It is flattering to be asked to write a review for a prestige journal. It is an implicit acknowledgement that one is enough of an expert to make you worth listening to on the subject. Yet, in some ways, this approach can mislead us: after all, it's ultimately not about whether the author of a novel or article is 'better' in some way than the reviewer covering their work.
We also need to take a reality check on the world of reviewing as well. A large part of it consists of advertising and promoting the book (let's say it is a book). Promotional puffs are the stock-in-trade in this game – writers from Edgar Wallace to Lee Child and Michael Connelly have needed their help. For James Crumley's striking 1975 novel
The Wrong Case, both then and since, puffs have helped sales along – endorsements by Ian Rankin ('resonant and lyrical') and Elmore Leonard, George Pelecanos and
The Guardian ('the poet laureate of American hard-boiled literature').
For Len Wanner's useful study of
Tartan Noir (Freight Books, 2015), there are two gushing puffs from Denise Mina and a Dr David Schmid of the University of Buffalo, both thank-yous for being cited so obsequiously in the guide. Puffs can be mutual – say, David Walliams for David Baddiel; striking but thin on critical acumen ('X writes like an angel on speed', 'this a ground-breaking and intensely intelligent book'); and simply meaningless ('utterly charming' – Tom Holland on Oliver Darkshire's self-indulgent
Once Upon a Tome, Bantam, 2022, ostensibly on antiquarian bookselling).
A recurring dilemma (and sometimes a nightmare) is when the reviewer knows the author well, not as a 'friend' but enough to have some pre-existing level of contact with them (as in occasional emails or encounters at conferences). Speaking about this with other hardened veterans from the reviewing battle-front, and trying to decide what is best when on the horns of a dilemma about what to say and how honest to be, the trade-off between losing a colleague or friend, there seems no consensus. The critical and objective distance between reviewer and reviewee can become so blurred by custom and familiarity as to make it difficult or impossible to say what (in your heart) you know should and must be said.
For instance, that the biographies of Jane Austen and Conan Doyle, which seem so marketably attractive now they've appeared in print, are trivial, derivative and contribute little to an already saturated market. That a study of Napoleon or Nixon is a mere jigsaw of borrowings, a bricolage struggling to be a coherent and original analysis, distorted by the author's hobby-horse belief that for every human life there is a psychiatric explanation, and that complex characters in real life like Edith Piaf or Hannah Arendt can be best interpreted with reference to the illness they had in the last year of their life or the traumas they had as children – that great teleological fallacy for biographers. That yet another study of Enid Blyton or Frances Hodgson Burnett, yet another guide to noir fiction is really necessary.
Worse still when the book for review is self-published. It is interesting how many writers declare that 'they do not self-publish' in the bios that appear on the back inner-flap of book-jackets. Several of these have come my way in the last year of so. One is about life in the Highlands (and intended for only limited distribution, even to the point of lacking an ISBN). Another is a self-published autobiography (a
Bildungsroman) of the author as a young man. A third is religious works by a retired minister of the church (more reminiscence than theology, full of sentimental anecdote of the church news-letter type). And the last one is an embarrassingly explicit account of first love – erotic fantasy of an elderly writer masquerading as literature.
To these, and all such, the reviewer must be ruthless. However much time and effort writers put lovingly into writing trash, it is nevertheless trash and should be seen as such. But – and it's an important 'but' – ways can and must be found to hide the harsh verdict of truth – an editorial decision that enough copy was already to hand and no space could be found for the review, or the reviewer is unable to review it in the time and so it goes into the limbo of the lost, or thumb-nail space is indeed found for a mere 50 words.
Trash aside, and making the important distinction between 'trash' and 'pulp' (which in publishing terms has turned into a commercial and at times critical phenomenon), there are for the reviewer those times when the manuscript or would-be article or published book is really quite good. The outline of a novel where there are simply too many characters, but, if refocused on one or two main ones, the whole thing would hang together. The structure of the plot where too many flashbacks, or not enough, make the story muddled, but that, with suitable re-shaping, it might really work.
Or where the idea is good but the tone is facetious or pompous, but with work it might succeed. A collection of papers from a professional publisher where contributions overlap but where mistakes can be remedied in enough time. Or (a real-life example) where a biographical reference work contained several fictitious entries, allegedly in order to anticipate detection by the publisher of any likely infringement, yet misleading in themselves enough to induce distrust in the reader.
With all or any of these, does and should the reviewer 'come clean', 'say it as it is', or smudge over the idiosyncrasies or blemishes in order to say that, like the curate's famous egg, it is good in parts, or in the main? Reviewing is a humble enough craft, the role that of intermediary, the process not unlike triage (where some of the patients are dead bodies). It has a marketing dimension and at worst can be a crude form of advertising – the puff is little more, the mutual puff even more so.
But there is a hidden moral side to it too – whether to say a book is rubbish if that's what it really is (and then how to disguise or euphemise comments to the author), whether to refuse a book if it's written by someone we know or if we know it will waste an irreplaceable day or week of our life, what to say if author feedback is hostile (at least journal peer review tends to be anonymous) or if there is bite-back on your own publications, and how to interpret the very role of reviewing itself – a facilitator, a midwife, a critic, a gatekeeper, a censor, an insider, an implied reader, an informed flaneur.
All authors think they're entitled to a magic review: that whisky blend of critical and commercial approval. Experienced reviewers could produce puffs by the yard to order. So why don't they? A lot is hidden, like an iceberg – the misgivings and cautions, the etiquette of the trade, living inside the whale of the system, the urge to encourage creativity, the fear of kick-back, the sheer love of opening parcels. Little money can be made but prestige can be nourished, time well spent, and personal libraries built up.
Susan Hill in
Howards End is On the Landing refers to a roomful of review books in her own house. Reviewing is serendipitous, like playing any piece of music at sight on the piano (the good accompanist's delight). Richly rewarding yet full of hazards: you can lose friends if you try to influence people. Once upon a time,
The Times Literary Supplement had anonymous reviewers – would we ever go back there, and would it make for greater honesty?
Dr Stuart Hannabuss is a writer and reviewer based in Scotland
