the Literary Saloon at the complete review – 21 – 26 November 2006 Archive

   Sutherland, Hill, and now Cooke on online v. off-line reviewing

       This has been much-discussed, but now that the original Sutherland-piece is finally available online (and Rachel Cooke has offered a silly print-defense) we also weigh in.
       It began with John Sutherland’s piece in The Telegraph — dramatically presented in the online version as: john sutherland IS SHOCKED BY THE STATE OF book-Reviewing on the web. His complaint is mainly with the reviews that appear on Amazon.com (and Amazon.co.uk) — but, without apparently looking much further, he sees fit to condemn all online reviewing.
       The example he uses is certainly a pretty feeble thing:

Early in August there appeared, some three weeks before the book’s publication, a ‘review’ (so called) of Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Leonard Woolf, posted by ‘Geena’, on amazon.co.uk. This was well before the book was available to the public, or any above-ground reviews had appeared.

      Sutherland is correct in pointing out that it is hardly a review — but he seems convinced that all Amazon-reviews are truly influential, i.e. that consumers will take even such uninformative and cursory commentary as the ‘review’ he cites and make their purchase-decisions based on that.
       He apparently also believes:

Why do the web-reviewers allow themselves to be recruited as unpaid hacks ? Partly for freebies. But more because they enjoy shooting off their mouths. And they enjoy the power.

       Power ? Is he serious ?
       Maybe he really believes that; he certainly hasn’t given it much thought — or the online reviewing community much consideration. After all, he readily makes the jump and tars all online-book coverage, suggesting he made up his mind without ever really looking around at what some — indeed, many — of us do:

There are those who see web-reviewing (whether independent bloggery, or commercially hosted) as a ‘power to the reader’ trend — the democratisation of something traditionally monopolised by literary mandarins. And there are those who see it as the degradation of literary taste. Myself, I’m of the Victor Frankenstein party.

       Susan Hill posted her response at her weblog — and shortly after that shared the now much-discussed e-mail she received (without revealing who she received it from), which stated:

I would like you to know that no book either published or written by you will in future be reviewed on our Literary Pages.

       Beside the many literary-weblog comments, there have also been some print reactions to the whole to-do — including, now, Rachel Cooke’s in today’s issue of The Observer, Deliver us from these latter-day Pooters.
       Cooke appears to go at it with an open mind. Well — semi-open, at least:

so much of the stuff you read in the so-called blogosphere is so awful: untrustworthy, banal and, worst of all, badly written. After I heard about the spat between Hill and Sutherland I devoted an entire day to book blogs, trying to give them a fair chance. This was not an edifying — or even a very interesting — experience, and I really, really love books.

       An entire day !
       But:

I read and I read; I dutifully followed every link. And come supper time all I could think was that not a sentence I’d read was a millionth as good as anything in The Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby’s recently published diary of ‘an exasperated but ever hopeful reader’. Why ? Because his words are measured, rather than spewed, out; because he is a good critic, and an experienced one; and because he can write. The trouble is, these qualities are exceptional — which is why they must be paid for.

       Sure, there’s a lot of boring crap — or at least material that’s of limited interest — on most weblogs (including, no doubt, this one) — but not a single sentence that was “a millionth as good” as even the worst in The Polysyllabic Spree ? ‘A millionth’ ? Isn’t that hyperbole of the sort that even a third-rate weblogger would be embarrassed to use ?
       But since she’s being hyperbolic, we wonder if that ‘entire day’ she spent reading book blogs wasn’t closer to … maybe twenty minutes ?
       She does mention some of the places she visited:

Hill’s blog, I’ve already dealt with. From there I went to a site all bloggers recommend, Dove Grey Reader, which is written by a ’sock-knitting quilter’ from Devon. I was pleased that she was ‘truly hooked from the first line onwards’ by Arnaldur Indridason’s thriller Silence of the Grave, and it does sound good — but I have friends to recommend thrillers to me. Grumpy Old Book Man is, according to the Guardian, one of the top 10 book blogs. Eh ? Even its author admits it’s an ‘acquired taste’ (here he is on Jeffrey Archer: ‘Good old Jeffrey. He’s always good for a laugh, isn’t he?’) Finally, to Reading Matters by ‘kimbofo’, an Australian in London. Do we really need to know that Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go has been on her TBR (To Be Read) pile for a year, or that she bought it as part of a discounted set of Booker novels ? Pooter lives!

       (As far as we can tell the names of two of these weblogs are ‘dovegreyreader scribbles’ and ‘Grumpy Old Bookman’, not ‘Dove Grey Reader’ and ‘Grumpy Old Book Man’, but maybe we’re just being pedantic. And while we enjoy dovegreyreader scribbles, we have not, in fact seen “all bloggers recommend” it.)
       Maybe this is a representative sampling — but we find it a bit hard to believe that among just, for example, the over 250 English-language active literary weblogs we link to (a far from comprehensive list) there isn’t material (and the odd well-formed sentence) that might be to Cooke’s liking.
       Finally: it’s easy to tar all bloggers with one broad brush, but on the whole we find that the literary weblogs do a pretty impressive job. Cooke goes into it believing: “so much of the stuff you read in the so-called blogosphere is so awful: untrustworthy, banal and, worst of all, badly written”, but especially in the book-blog world there’s quite a bit of fine and thoughtful writing (and those weblogs — like this one — that are more information-providers surely don’t do that much worse of a job than many wire and newspaper reports …). And as far as book-coverage being untrustworthy … it would hardly seem to apply. (Indeed, readers surely can determine how much they can/should trust a weblogger based on a quick scroll through the weblog, no ?)
       And, to return to John Sutherland, as far as online reviewing goes … well, we’ll be so bold as to defend at least what we do, and suggest that our review-coverage is actually of considerable use. Yes, we’re atypical (and, by linking to and quoting from print-reviews, in a sense also partly dependent on old media) but then one of the wonders of the Internet is that it allows for all sorts of new (and often useful) approaches, and there are all sorts of sites tackling book coverage in new and innovative — and useful — ways. And we think if you’re looking for information (critical and otherwise) about, say, Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Against the Day, or Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (or what about English-language coverage of Kertész Imre’s recent autobiography, K. dosszié ? we haven’t seen the TLS get to that yet …), the complete review is a pretty darn good place to start.
       Not every literary weblog is a goldmine of information or an always-stylish read, but most of the ones we regularly visit (dozens) certainly do offer us at least something that is … at least a thousandth as good as “as anything in The Polysyllabic Spree” — and often much more. Online coverage won’t soon replace print coverage of books, but the defensive (and close to blind) hysteria Sutherland and Cooke display suggests a lot of people are still having trouble seeing the value of what is already on offer online — a lot of which is very impressive indeed.

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