FIGURES IN THE LANDSCAPE
Critics,
Writers, Readers
Often in reviews of books, I read about a place called the Landscape
of Australian Literature. Books and writers get placed in this landscape. When
writing a book, you maybe should work out where you want to put it in the
landscape. I think perhaps the critic is an ant in the leaf litter of the
Landscape of Australian Literature.
Then there is a certain language that belongs to criticism. The other day I saw on the cover of a new
book:
‘The most intelligent, captivating, and exquisitely written book of
this year or any year.’
For one thing I don’t know what that means. But I had to assume the
blurb was trying to be funny. I didn’t actually investigate. Anyhow I looked
the book up online and discovered it to be – I quote –
‘An original, poignant
modern-day take on Wuthering Heights, as a high school senior searches
for her teacher and meets a boy who may just be Heathcliff come to life.’
But back to
critics.
The critic
has a small role to play in the reception of a book.
I think the critic must somehow try to follow the project that the
writer has set out to present. No use reading Shane Maloney and trying to make
him into Jane Austen. But you do sometimes read reviews that accuse a writer of
not being another writer. I have been accused of not being Shakespeare, and
Marion Halligan has been accused of not being
Patrick White. There are really no rules by which a novel, for
instance, can be judged. The reader/critic has to give over something to the
terms of the particular novel itself. No use wishing you were reviewing the
latest Ian McEwan if you are actually reviewing D.B.C Pierre.
I suppose you could say you need to ‘honour’ the work in hand. Give
it the benefit of the doubt, maybe. But then critics also have to be able to
give an opinion on how well they consider the writer has fulfilled the writer’s
own criteria. In other words – what does the critic think the writer thought she
was doing, and does the critic think this aim was achieved? And was it worth
doing?
When a radio play I wrote was broadcast on the BBC in 1998, a
listener from India called in with her response which was outrage. She vowed
never to listen to plays on the BBC ever again because of the shocking racism
of the first few minutes of my play. She had switched off after that. The play
was a dramatic expression of MY outrage at violent racism in Van Diemens Land
in the nineteenth century. This woman has gone into my vocabulary as Outraged
of Bangalore, and she is an example of a critic who has no idea what she is
talking about because she hasn’t paid fair attention to the whole work.
The first thing any critic must do is consider the whole work under
review. You might be surprised at how often this is not the case.
When I read a book review my first criterion is that it should not be
dull. If the construction and tone and sentences of the review are dull, if the
review itself doesn’t invite me in, I can’t take it very seriously. For an
author, the dull review is worse than the negative review. Dull and negative –
well of course that’s the pits. I want a review of any book by me or anyone
else to give the sense that the reviewer has engaged with the work, reflected
on it, and constructed a response that will honour the work and inform the
reader-of-the-review. Does the reviewer like the book and why? If not, why not?
I am a big consumer of reviews.
Way back in the early 1980s, before the internet, before book groups,
before writers’ festivals, I started subscribing to the Literary Review
which is an English monthly journal of book reviews written by selected experts
in matters literary. I love the Literary Review and I still read it
every month. I’ll read reviews anywhere and everywhere. If I start listing all
the places, it will sound a bit ridiculous. But I will confess that once a
month I go to the hairdresser and there I read the reviews in the Women’s
Weekly and also The Monthly. I also get nice haircuts and good cups
of tea.
I believe that the best way to learn to write in any form – novel,
short story, poem, review – is to read and analyse many many examples of
the chosen form. I can’t remember when I wrote my first review, or what I
reviewed, or who published it. I’d like to read it, but I’m a poor archivist of
my own work. So it’s pretty much lost, I think. I do know that my only
information on how to do it was the reviews I had absorbed, since there were no
courses or books I knew of on how to do it, and my formal education ended
before the invention of the task called the ‘book report’. At school we used to
study novels and analyse them and write essays on them. That was all.
Because I also write novels and stories, I am familiar with having my
own work reviewed, so I have at least two perspectives on the matter.
The reviewer and the reviewed. And another perspective is that of the
consumer, the reader who reads reviews to discover how books are being received
and described.
Before a book is available for sale, there is much promotional
activity that goes on. Some if it is kind of crypto critical – all positive of
course. Also there is vigorous social media, and these days there are sometimes
animations of the narrative.
But often the first piece of comment the book-buyer gets on
any book is found on the cover. Such as the one about being the best book of
this year or any year. The publisher provides a few words of praise from
critics etc and offers them to the prospective buyers and readers. A recent
collection of stories by C.K. Stead says the stories are ‘challenging, fun,
urbane and brilliant’. On the cover of a selection of poems by Billy Collins,
Carol Ann Duffy says: ‘Billy Collins is one of my favourite poets in the
world.’ I actually prefer her kind of personal comment to the ‘brilliant fun’ thing.
I suppose because her kind sounds alive, whereas the other one is just a
collection of buzz words. So there, at
random from my bookshelf, are two different ways of presenting a book – with an
authoritative list of adjectives, or with a completely personal rush of praise.
You can see that such things don’t really mean much. You
wouldn’t expect to find negative comments offered by the publisher anyway. It
is also fashionable for writers to be described as writing luminous or limpid
prose, but I have never quite understood what kind of prose those might be.
In other words, book reviews are often collections of rather weird
‘review clichés’ which glide past the eyes of readers as code for good or bad.
You know when you see a reviewer, towards the end of the glowing review, saying
‘however’ that this is the signal for the fact that they are going to say
something derogatory. They go: Searingly honest, poetic and visceral, monumental,
luminous, brilliant, deeply uplifting, gripping like the jaws of a dingo…
HOWEVER…says the critic …here are some REALLY BAD things that will put you off.
This is a dull and routine review rhythm.
Good good good – really bad. Where did the reviewer really stand on
that book? Not sure.
The next earliest commentary on a book can be found in journals on
publishing, produced for booksellers and publishers. In June you will read
reviews of books that are going to be published in September. This gives the
reviewer a chance to discover where the book will sit in that good old Landscape
of Australian Literature. For one thing. Make no mistake – it’s really the
Landscape of Australian Marketing that we are talking about here. The reviewer
is a very small element in the grand plan of the marketing department of the
publisher.
Anyhow – what you see after the stuff in those journals might be a
blurb from a bookseller. Now these are always positive, because the bookseller
is selling books, but they do give you some insight into the kind of book you
are dealing with. Of course these things are not without commercial support
from the publisher – so they will never be altogether without bias. There
exists a blurry line between criticism and promotion.
Then come the reviews in local and international newspapers, and in
journals, on radio. There are the blogs, some useful, some not – it’s a given
that these days anybody can publish a review, and that much of what is written
online is by any average standard just rubbish – but I think the most reliable
reviewing is still found in places where editors have selected experienced
reviewers who know what the whole thing is about. The best things are often
longish essays in which the critic has been given the time and space to deliver
thoughtful and careful analysis. The Sydney Review of Books is such a
place. You also get panel discussions – on TV and at Festivals and so on. Somewhere
in this maelstrom of words is the critic.
The critic plays a small part in the complexity of the life of a
book, and is as I said, probably an ant among the leaf litter in the Landscape
of Australian Literature.
No comments:
Post a Comment