Book Reviews: Who Cares? by Catherine Czerkawska

A very 'traditional' book.

Among the many writing jobs I've undertaken in the course of a long career, I've sometimes reviewed books in a ‘professional’ capacity. I was writing for reputable magazines and newspapers and they paid me. Not a lot. But it was one more way of staving off penury. 

Mind you, even there the times are a-changing. A well published (but by no means wealthy) writer friend told me how he was asked to review an autobiography of a Very Famous Person for a popular newspaper, on the understanding that no money would change hands. ‘We thought you’d be honoured!’ they said. He told them that the day Asda or Tesco were honoured to supply him with free food would be the day he’d work for a big commercial organisation for nothing.

Most of the time, book editors would – and still occasionally do - ask me to review a particular book because they've seen something in my professional experience which lead them to think I might be interested in it. I’ve never been asked to do a hatchet job, nor have I been asked to review something just to praise it to the skies.

As a young writer, I wrote a couple of reviews I now regret, of novels I disliked. But experience long ago taught me the folly of griping in print about what is, after all, a purely personal opinion. What good does it do anyone? You vent your spleen and have a bit of a laugh but it doesn’t make you a better writer or a better person for that matter.

Non-fiction is a different matter, since it's possible to engage in civilised debate over factual matters without becoming personal. (Well, it should be!) But novels are, by their very nature, personal. They are our babies and we love them, warts and all.

The novelist whose book you are slating is hurt, angry and defensive. The reader who agrees with you will only have his or her prejudices confirmed. The reader who loves the work in question will feel hurt, angry and defensive on behalf of the writer, and resentful at having his or her taste denigrated.

Nobody is ever persuaded.  Nobody learns anything. And besides, it’s pretty much subjective. All matters of taste are. If you disagree with me (as you’re fully entitled to do) please read John Carey’s elegant dissection of just this topic, ‘What Good Are The Arts’. His arguments are very persuasive and he’s better qualified than I am to put them. So is the gently ironic Grayson Perry for that matter.

Positive reviews which don’t just say ‘I liked this’, but which try to tease out why, are helpful not just to readers but to writers as well. Because, surprising as it may seem, you don’t always know what you’ve done. It often takes a comment from somebody else to make you understand. One of my most illuminating  reviews to date says, 'The writing in this book is so tight you could bounce a quarter off it.' Bless you, Lorissa K. Evans, whoever you are. But cheering as it was, this was a review which also made me realise it was exactly that ‘tightness’ of prose which I was trying to achieve throughout many rewrites of the Curiosity Cabinet, honing it like a poem. Perhaps the book isn’t, as I once feared, either too short or too quiet. Maybe it’s just ‘concentrated’!

This is not to say that a review needs to be wholly positive to be useful to reader and writer alike. When I think about reviews I’ve had for my plays over the years, it was the equivocal comments which intrigued me enough to make me think ‘maybe she has a point.’ A critic might give a play a generally positive review – clearly she had been sufficiently engaged to take it seriously. But she might also want to point out what didn’t quite work for her and why she felt like that. I may not have been overjoyed with this kind of review – who ever is? - but because I felt that the reviewer was in some way ‘on my side’ I was more inclined to take on board her honest reservations and learn something useful in the process. That’s what the very best editors do as well – they ask the difficult questions, the ones you don’t really want to hear. But in finding the answers, you improve your skills. 

It’s so often a matter of respect. As a reviewer, you respect the reader, but you also respect the writer. I think your job is to illuminate the book in some way. So yes, you are telling the reader what it is about – but any cover or Amazon blurb will do that. You are also being careful to review and analyse the book on its own terms, as it is written – not the book you wish it had been, nor yet the book you would have written yourself.

Essentially, you are treating the work seriously enough to try to get at what the writer intended, to get to the heart of the book. Reservations are perfectly acceptable, but if you don’t enjoy a book enough, if nothing strikes you as ‘true’ about it, you may as well not bother. And by truth, I don’t mean realism. I mean the idea that the writer has created what the brilliant Bernard MacLaverty calls ‘made up truth’. 

Which leads me to the current debate about reviews of self or independently published books. The problem for anyone trying to take a definite stance about all this is that the publishing lines have become immeasurably blurred. Publishing is no longer reputable versus vanity. It’s a huge and exciting spectrum which runs from the all-singing, all-dancing major corporations, through hundreds, possibly thousands of medium sized and small presses, reputable or otherwise, paper or eBook and sometimes so small that they involve one dedicated person working hard in a room. It’s a spectrum which encompasses the individual self publisher who may be just one dedicated writer working hard in a room, the ‘authorpreneur’ who begs or buys in whatever help is needed.

It will also nowadays include the writer who thinks he or she needs no help whatsoever, and soldiers on regardless, putting rough and ready work out there for friends and relatives to enjoy - or not. These are the people who were once regularly conned out of thousands by vanity presses. So at least one set of sharks will soon be rendered extinct. (Unfortunately, they are still managing to prey on the unwary, just doing it differently.) 

But what harm does the plethora of self publishing actually do in a world where bandwidth is virtually unlimited, and where you can download a sample to try before you buy? 'There is so much garbage out there' commentators will say. 'How will anyone ever be able to find the good writing amid the dross?'

But if you ask them whether they themselves can find the good writing they seek, they never seem to have much trouble. I have young friends who love fan fiction. They never have any problems finding what they want either. I like to read blogs about vintage perfume and textiles. I never have any difficulty in finding excellent blogs among the millions online. So who, exactly, is this 'anyone' they are so worried for? 


Dedicated writers will carry on writing and publishing. Well published writers who have fallen out of favour because of shifting fashions (not always reflecting what the readers out there actually want) will carry on writing and publishing. Beginning writers will learn, revise, and improve. Deluded dabblers will get bored and move on to other things. Or they too may learn, revise and improve. Who can say for sure? Who should say for sure? In fact the real irony of the debate is that the more good, thoughtful reviewers refuse to engage with the new generation of self publishers, the harder it becomes for readers to find the books they might enjoy. But not that hard. Somebody will always step in to fill the breach. It's the nature of the online world. 

Charles Schulz and Snoopy on fine authorial form.

Of course if you’re running a review blog, you can review (or not review) whatever you damn well please. If you only want to review post modernist fiction with elements of intertextual magical realism, that's your prerogative.  On the other hand, if – like me - you’re also writing for a dedicated eBook review site - the Indie eBook Review in my case, where I review and have also been reviewed - you have every right in the world to (a) tackle self or independently published books and (b) only review books you’ve enjoyed. This is a million miles away from agreeing to promote a colleague’s work without genuine admiration. And believe me, traditional publishing does more than its fair share of this. It’s accepted practice within the industry, to the extent that an agent will ask you if you know any insider ‘names’ who might be prevailed upon to give you a ‘submission’ quote. I’ve written a few of those begging letters myself, and that’s another thing I find myself regretting, with all the benefit of hindsight. 

But as for reading something and enjoying it enough to want to tell other people about it, regardless of who published it - isn’t that what most of us do most of the time when we tell friends about the books we've enjoyed? Isn’t that what we do with just about everything in life? So if some of us - professionals included - want to take a little extra time and trouble to put those judgements into words for more people to read, if we’ve engaged with something enough to want to illuminate and explicate it and pass on our thoughts about it, whether it was conventionally or indie published or, indeed, stencilled on purple paper and thrown into the sea in a bottle - who's to say that it isn't a worthwhile activity for all concerned?

www.wordarts.co.uk 

Catherine Czerkawska