All about reviewing

Who are all these experts?

Recently I heard a writer give a talk and she was cross about readers’ reviews on Amazon. Who are all these people? These experts? What qualifies them to write this stuff?

They’re consumers, I guess. They’re paying out their cash and that’s all that’s needed to qualify anyone to be an expert these days. Being a consumer gives you the power and the right to say what you want, it seems.

I could see the writer’s point, though. Those Amazon reviews stick around. They stick to your book. When other sites cut and paste the details, these reviews – fond, intemperate, foul – cling on, like a little trail of stardust.

The writer who complained said she didn’t mind when she got reviewed in a Sunday paper say, by another novelist, and they slagged off her work. At least they knew a bit about it. They knew something about the craft. The online-retail-site reviewer doesn’t have to know much about anything at all.

I’m in two minds about all of this, as usual.

On the one hand, reviews online can be really annoying. Hastily typed out, easily damning, thoughtless, silly. Look at the pompous tone of this quote – plucked at random from an Amazon review of a newer book by the man who wrote the ‘Borribles’ trilogy. I just love the casual mock-expertise of this, and the awful mangled metaphor…

‘I have to say this now, but Foxes Oven is as good as anything I have ever read. It may be that MDL had his fingers in too many pies (writing style wise) to forge a reputation as a great novelist, but this is an amazing book.’

I also strongly dislike that middlebrow assumption that different styles and fingers-in-pies means a dilution of a writer’s talent or a waste of his or her energies and potential. That’s exactly what people who don’t or can’t write generally think. (Writers like to keep busy! They have lots of ideas! They have to make a living! Also, they get bored easily and like to try out new stuff, in my experience anyway.)

On the other hand… I’m not sure I want to give reviewing over to the pro’s in the papers, either. Just look how many long reviews of novels are written by the same old farts, parping on about another bunch of old farts. Dancing the two-step down the decades, farting as they go, changing partners, reviewing each other, fart-arsing about, and trumpeting praise for each other…

Or those tiny reviews in the ‘paperback round up’ pages, where someone seemingly reads a bunch of pages at random, copies out the blurb and adds a few smart-arsey remarks…

They’re always saying the books pages are being squeezed smaller and smaller in the Sunday papers. I’m not sure I’m bothered. They usually depressed me anyway. All those weighty and worthy history books. Those serious-sounding novels (‘It’s about exile, memory, loss and desire…’) Those horrible interviews with someone looking pained and cradling their head in their hands.

I suppose I’m thinking about this because I just wrote a review for this blog today, of Anne Tyler’s latest. I published it and thought, ‘WHAT AM I DOING? I HATE REVIEWS!!’

I still don’t know what I was doing. Trying to get to the bottom of why I felt a little nonplussed and let down by reading a new book by my favourite novelist? It wasn’t for a commission or anything. I just wanted to do it.

I once tried reviewing for the papers. I hated doing it and I think I probably wasn’t any good at it. It made me feel jumpy and weird. I got too interested, if that makes any sense, in saying what I really meant, and saying what I really thought.

I do like writing about books, and talking about them, obviously. I like the way blogging and reviews on blogs can become more like a conversation. A bit like a two dimensional salon. Maybe I prefer proper readers, thinking aloud, and talking to each other. I like ideas bouncing around, like in a seminar or a workshop.

Also, when I write in first person, about something that bothers or perplexes me, I’m told it can come across as a bit of a rant. Does it? Is it? Am I banging on again..? Answers on a postcard.