Book reviewers are by and large a fairly anonymous tribe, though of course they can often have more prominent other selves as real writers. They do not often talk or write about what they do when they read a novel for review: they just do it, sometimes perhaps getting the business over as quickly as possible.
It was therefore somewhat unusual when a good two dozen of them responded to a request from The Irish Times last year to comment on the social media brouhaha that followed a particularly critical review by Eileen Battersby of Paul Murray's novel The Mark and the Void. Regular reviewers were asked two specific questions: "How honest can you be reviewing books by Irish authors in a country like Ireland, where the literary scene is so small? And as a writer, how do you respond to a bad review?"
Some respondents took a no-nonsense approach. “Honesty is imperative,” wrote Sinéad Gleeson. “If a critic cannot be honest about a book, they should reconsider their line of work.” Others, however, were inclined to outline the difficulties such honesty could lead to. Anne Haverty said she never reviewed books by friends; Rosita Boland said she no longer reviewed books by Irish authors. The authors in question, I suppose, might not always be people one had yet met, but still, one would be almost bound to encounter them fairly soon, or their friends or supporters, at literary gatherings. The ensuing unpleasantness – not to mention the hovering possibility of revenge – seemed to many reviewers to be perhaps too large a price to pay for a small cheque.
John Boyne acknowledged these difficulties but also made another point. “A writer,” he reminded us, “can spend anything from a year to a decade on their novel; a reviewer might read it in a day and review it in an afternoon, completely ignoring all the work that has gone into the book.” I must say I admire anyone who can polish off a book in a day and write a succinct and compelling judgment of it in an afternoon. Reading a book will frequently take me a week, and writing a review almost forever.
Seventy years ago it seems that a professional reviewer sometimes also known as a hack reviewer would not have been inclined to waste so much time, at least if we are to believe George Orwell in his essay Confessions of a Book Reviewer. For Orwell, the book reviewer is almost always a drudge: that is, while he or she might well be a serious writer reviewing is an activity that is taken on purely for the money: not that there is often that much of it. “He is a man of 35, but looks 50. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles ... If things are normal with him he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will be suffering from a hangover.”
The chief concern of Orwell’s hack reviewer is to get through his package (three or four sometimes ill-matched books very often lumped together for a multiple review) as quickly as possible. But on this occasion he is horrified to find that three of the books he has been sent are on subjects he knows so little about that he may have to read 50 pages of each to avoid making the kind of howler that the author, or even the reader, might spot. It should be said that the spirit of Orwell’s essay is largely humorous, but one suspect there may have been a fair amount of truth behind it.
There are two assumptions that underlie the survey on attitudes to book-reviewing referred to above. The first is that a book is a novel (or just occasionally a poetry collection): this is perhaps understandable given that it was a review of a novel that sparked the inquiry. The second is that reviews come in two kinds: good (“full of beauty, pain and truth”, “the work of a genuine artist”) and bad (“tedious, laboured, self-conscious”, a “maudlin bit of tripe”).
But there are other kinds of books and other kinds of review. Indeed the word itself has two distinct meanings: an assessment of a newly published book, and a journal that features such assessments, as in the Edinburgh Review, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books etc. When such journals first appeared on the market more than 300 years ago – they were eagerly welcomed by the expanding literate and book-buying public though some reservations were expressed by more traditional scholars and bookmen, principally the fear that instead of buying and reading books people would now find it easier, and sufficient, to read about them.
Ireland's monthly literary review, the online Dublin Review of Books (drb.ie), is modelled after its New York and London near-namesakes. Its ambition – how it sees its role in regard to books and intellectual life – is neatly encapsulated in the title of a print anthology it has just published to celebrate its tenth anniversary, Space to Think. As the book's introduction puts it: "Essays we publish might comprise a detailed appreciation of the work of a particular novelist or poet ... The style might be serious or light and the reading experience might be enlightening or fun or compelling, or all of these. But in all cases the Dublin Review of Books provides its contributors with the freedom to develop an argument: it provides them with the space to think, the space to develop their ideas."
What this means in practice is that reviews can be 3,000 words or more and obviously range more widely than a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. Indeed they are often more review-essays than reviews per se, with the authors encouraged to bring their own expertise in and around the subject to the exercise to add to that of the writer of the book being reviewed.
There is obviously a role for the short review which attempts to encapsulate a book’s purpose and evaluate to what degree it has achieved it in a small number of words. But there is a role too for an essay which evaluates not just one book but sometimes aspects of the field of study, the intellectual tradition in which it is situated. Both exercises act as essential supports to bookselling and book-publishing, activities which, while not wildly profitable, continue to survive in spite of many predictions of their imminent eclipse.
The Dublin Review of Books, a voluntary effort carried on chiefly by two people over 10 years, is proud of its role as a support for book-publishing and as a champion of the cultural importance of books and reading. During that period we have published a thousand substantial essays on literature, history, politics and many other subjects and they continue to be available and free to access online. And now, to celebrate our tenth birthday, we have collected some 40 of the best essays we have published in a handsome new volume, Space to Think, which we hope as many people as possible will buy and enjoy.
