p u l p i t d om i n i c s a n db r o ok
Bury the Hatchet
The Hatchet Job of the Year award, which was set up two years ago by the Omnivore, a review aggregation website, really ought to be my kind of thing. Like everybody else, I love reading really bad reviews – provided, of course, that they aren’t spearing my own books. And the judges’ tastes are impeccable. The winner of last year’s award, the Sunday Times journalist Camilla Long, is one of the funniest writers you could hope to read, and her evisceration of Rachel Cusk’s self-pitying memoir Aftermath – ‘In Cusk’s world, even the canapés are victims’ – is a joy.
And the other pieces on the shortlist were pretty good, too, in a memorably stinging way. Here’s Craig Brown, getting his teeth into Richard Bradford’s book about Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin: ‘It is a triumph of “cut and paste” – indeed, such a triumph that by now Bradford must be able to press the Command button and C for Copy simultaneously in his sleep.’ Then there’s my favourite, Richard J Evans’s spectacular attack on A N Wilson’s life of Hitler – a product, according to Evans, of ‘the repellent arrogance of a man who thinks that because he’s a celebrated novelist, he can write a book about Hitler that people should read, even though he’s put very little work into writing it and even less thought’.
Even though all the shortlisted reviews made me laugh, the Hatchet Job award makes me feel a bit queasy. The Omnivore’s manifesto for last year’s Hatchet Job, published on its website, insisted that the judges rewarded ‘honesty, wit and good writing’ rather than ‘mediocrity, sycophancy and lazy adjectives’. Who could possibly disagree with that? (Even though they rather spoiled it by waffling about putting ‘the reader first ’.) But a brief caption on their home page puts it slightly differently. The award, they say, is for ‘the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months’. Now we are getting closer to the truth – which is, of course, that the Hatchet Job rewards the funniest bad review of the year. After all, you can write honestly, wittily and well without being angry or trenchant. In fact, you can write honestly and wittily about a book you love. But you won’t win the Hatchet Job of the Year.
The problem with the Hatchet Job of the Year award, it seems to me, is that it encourages nasty, wanton negativity. Imagine an award for the best positive review of the year, the winner photographed shaking hands with a beaming Alain de Botton. I think we can all agree it would be a ghastly prospect. But to the outside observer, the Hatchet Job award looks pretty ghastly too. On their website, the organisers have posted pictures of the award ceremony. A motley assortment of literary editors, writers, hangers-on and groupies stand around clutching drinks and laughing uproariously. Everyone is having a tremendous time. And so it is easy to forget, amid the backslapping and the camaraderie, that they are effectively celebrating the skewering of somebody else’s book – a book that may well deserve skewering,
that may well be shoddy and second-rate and pretentious and fraudulent, but that nevertheless represents another individual’s work. True, relishing the failings of others is an inevitable part of human nature. But it is not, perhaps, a very attractive one.
Bad reviews have their place, of course. Most books pages are in enough trouble already, their budgets and pages mercilessly slashed, without handing them over to a generation of Fotherington-Thomases (‘Hullo clouds hullo sky’). Like many critics, I rather enjoy writing bad reviews: what reviewer does not nurse, somewhere in the darkest, most crooked recesses of his soul, the dream that one day his peers will whisper of his reputation as a ruthless hatchet man? Yet one of the unspoken realities about book reviewing, to which the Hatchet Job organisers seem oblivious, is that writing bad reviews is just easier than writing good or even-handed ones. If you violently dislike a book, or at least appear to, then you don’t really have to engage with it. You don’t have to explain why it works or even why it doesn’t; you can just set fire to it and dance on the ashes. If you’re the American critic Dale Peck, you get to start a review with the words ‘Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation’, and it becomes the most infamous review of the century. I expect Rick Moody has had plenty of good reviews. But who remembers them?
The assumption behind the Hatchet Job award is that reviews ought to be angrier. The blurb for the first award insisted that its existence ‘means asking why many people who like books think the book pages aren’t for them. It means challenging notions that professional criticism is inward-looking and self-serving. It means making sure book reviews are not simply informative, but entertaining.’ I still don’t understand, though, why that means reviews ought to be more aggressive. Every bad review, after all, represents a kind of failure – a cause for regret, not for rejoicing. A film critic who doesn’t feel a little frisson of excitement as the cinema lights dim is surely in the wrong job. And a book critic who starts with the assumption that he ought to be angry should probably be driving a van or teaching PE instead.
Staring up at me from my desk as I write is Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher, which dropped through the letter box this morning. I haven’t opened it yet, but in a few days I have to produce 1,500 words on it for a Sunday paper. If the book stinks, that becomes immediately easier. An angry, trenchant review of the authorised Thatcher biography? No problem. A ten-year-old could do it. Moore himself, with his love of hunting and his unabashed High Toryism, is an easy target, and I could stamp all over the book in my sleep. In fact, if I do it angrily and trenchantly enough, I might get onto the Hatchet Job shortlist. But deep down, I don’t want to. I don’t want it to be bad. Why would I want to waste hours of my life reading a bad book? I want it to be good. r m a y 2 0 1 3 | Literary Review 1
