In America in recent months, there has been an outbreak of agonising about the state of book reviewing. Several long articles—and one widely reviewed book: Faint Praise, by Gail Pool—have appeared proclaiming the genre to be if not moribund, then at least in a condition of semi-decrepitude. These concerns have been prompted, most immediately, by the slimming down of book review sections in the US print media. In the last few years, the books pages of most major US papers—as well as a host of smaller ones—have had their word counts slashed, their commissioning budgets cut and their staff downsized. Only the New York Times Book Review appears unscathed. But the issue goes deeper than this. At play are anxieties about the vitality of literary culture, the relationship between print and digital media, even the long-term survival of book-reading itself. Throughout its history, the book review has occupied an uncertain position in relation to the body of literature, being perceived, alternatively, as a nourishing agent and a pest. Growing fears for the genre's survival in the US have, at least, gone some way to resolving this issue. Most people agree that if people stop writing about books, books will be worse off.
In Britain, so far, there haven't been any similar eruptions of concern. While this may partly be because British journalists are less fond of navel-gazing than their American counterparts (and let's not forget that book reviewing, as traditionally conceived, is a branch of journalism), it is also because, on the face of it, book reviewing in this country is in fairly robust health. The downscaling that has affected US papers hasn't occurred here. On the contrary, if anything the trend has been for papers to expand their books coverage, with several—notably the Guardian and the Times—launching stand-alone books sections that are sort of mini-literary magazines in their own right. Newspapers have proved adept at co-opting new trends in book reading and commentary: some have launched literary blogs and book clubs; many sponsor prizes and festivals. A lively chatter surrounds the British book scene, of which newspaper review sections are a central part.
But scan the horizon more closely, and the outlook doesn't look so good in Britain either. While it is too early to talk of a crisis, it is becoming possible to see the outlines of what a future one might look like. Over the last couple of years, book reviewing has been the focus of several skirmishes and spats; these are perhaps less significant for their substance than for what they reveal about the shifting power relations within the literary landscape. In 2005, Scott Pack, the chief buyer of Waterstone's, rounded on newspaper book sections, accusing them of being "irrelevant." The following year, the blogging "community" reacted furiously when the academic John Sutherland (himself a prodigious newspaper reviewer) suggested that literary blogs and online reviews—particularly those on Amazon—were leading to a "degradation of literary taste." "How dare one of these 'literary mandarins' feel they are above us and by implication, above book buyers and readers?" the novelist Susan Hill fumed on her blog. This, in turn, prompted a newspaper literary editor to email Hill informing her that "no book either published or written by you will in future be reviewed on our literary pages." (Hill reproduced the email, but didn't identify the author.) A third kerfuffle occurred last October when the chair of the 2007 Booker judges, Howard Davies, used his prize speech to attack reviewers for being overly timid, reverential and back-scratching. Literary journalists were predictably incensed. What right did a "career financial bureaucrat"—as Jason Cowley described Davies—have to tell critics how to do their job? Robert McCrum, literary editor of the Observer, pronounced it the "most embarrassing Booker speech in living memory."
But while there is nothing new about lambasting critics, those who have done so most recently differ in an important respect from the likes of Behan, Orwell and Amis. When these writers mocked book reviewing, they did so from a position of superiority. They were successful authors at the top of the literary pecking order—and this is what gave them the authority to dismiss reviewers (although, in the admonitions of Orwell and Amis, there was also an element of self-satire: both were tireless reviewers early in their careers). In other words, attacking book reviewing has in the past largely been the privilege of those who produce "real" literature, and who therefore feel qualified to sneer at the efforts of those who merely comment upon it. But at the same time, such attacks have invariably contained an element of defensiveness, because critics have always had a kind of authority over writers too—through the ability to pass judgment on their work. No "real" writer ever aspires to be just a book reviewer, while most book reviewers want to be real writers. Yet no real writer has the ability to affect the standing of a reviewer in the way that a reviewer can that of a writer. This is the devil's pact that has bound writers and critics together: each possesses something that the other values.
The powers of discrimination that have made writers both fearful and dismissive of critics have traditionally given them a wider authority too. Critics, according to the most favourable interpretation of their function, are priest-like figures who elucidate the messages in literature that ordinary people are incapable of deciphering. But merely to describe the critic's role in these terms is to grasp what an outmoded notion it is. These days, any claim by critics (or anyone else) to have inherently superior judgment is seen as fraudulent, and it is no longer just famous writers who consider it their right to point this out. The recent attacks on reviewers have been assaults from below. "The fact is that the tide has turned and the people have power now," Susan Hill wrote in her response to John Sutherland. "The lazy, stuck-in-the-mud, cliquey literary editors, and/or mandarins are now almost totally irrelevant."
This is a long way from the de-haut-en-bas dismissals of the past; it is the language of appropriation, giddy with entitlement. One doesn't have to be a dyed-in-the-wool elitist to find Hill's triumphalism distasteful and even slightly ridiculous. But her sentiments do reveal much about how the literary world is changing. Creative writers may have some vestigial authority, but in the domain of opinion, the old hierarchies no longer hold sway. Bloggers, booksellers, prize judges, critics: nowadays all inhabit the same, frighteningly level playing field.
Why has this happened? There are a number of reasons. First, the declining prestige of book reviewing is linked to the increasing commercialisation of publishing and the resulting reordering of power relations within the book world. When Scott Pack of Waterstone's declared book reviews "irrelevant," he was not primarily venturing an opinion on the quality of contemporary criticism. He was saying something about power, which can be paraphrased as follows: "The opinions of reviewers may have had a large bearing on a book's fortunes once, but not any more; these days, my judgement is far, far more important." And he is right. One of the key developments in publishing in the last two decades has been the consolidation of power within bookselling: with the rise of chain stores such as WH Smith, Waterstone's and Borders—and, more recently, the emergence of supermarkets as booksellers—a small number of retailers have come to dominate the market, making it harder, though not impossible, for smaller outlets to survive. As a result, the stocking decisions of a few large companies have come to assume massive importance in determining which titles succeed and which fail. It is not that press coverage no longer matters: publishers still welcome a nice spread in a weekend paper. But the value of such coverage pales in comparison to that conferred by a run in Tesco, or on Waterstone's 3-for-2 counters.
Moreover, it is increasingly not just retailers who possess a disproportionate sway over literary fortunes. In recent years, other players have become similarly influential. Most significant among these is the Richard and Judy book club, which, since being created four years ago, has achieved an extraordinary dominance over British publishing, on a par with Oprah's book club in the US. Amanda Ross, who selects the titles for the club, is arguably the one person in the country whose personal tastes can create a bestseller—for that is what nearly every book on which Richard and Judy bestow their favour becomes (see "Reading Richard and Judy" by Elena Lappin, Prospect March 2006). Ross can boss publishers around with impunity: if she doesn't like a book's cover, or its publication date doesn't fit her schedules, she tells them so, and they oblige. But the Richard and Judy effect is merely one of the new forces ranged against the old power of book reviewers: others include literary prizes, which are growing in number and command ever more press attention, and television—many bestsellers these days are television tie-ins, or are written by people whose fame is television-derived. These things don't just determine sales; they dictate the conversation. Which books get talked about, and what is said about them, are things over which critics no longer have much control. Literary editors and reviewers dance to a tune of others' devising, and the advantages that have traditionally been theirs—literary taste, the ability to make clever distinctions—seem almost comically insubstantial in comparison.
The second major factor in the downgrading of book reviews has been the rise of technologies that encourage and facilitate the democratisation of opinion. By far the most important of these is the internet, although other forms of interactivity—notably television and radio phone-ins—have played a part. The idea that all opinions are equal, of course, pre-dates the internet. But the internet has given it a kind of tangible impetus. After all, before the internet existed, a measure of inequality was built into publishing. All opinions clearly weren't equal, because while everybody could express a view on any matter, only those who were paid to do so could publish them, and thereby reach a wide audience. But blogging has removed this barrier. Now anyone can publish their opinion on any subject, and that opinion can (theoretically at least) be read by everybody. That time-honoured refuge of the unnoticed—self-publishing—has been reinvented as a vehicle of self-empowerment. Moreover, the obvious rejoinder to bloggers—an opinion's being "out there" doesn't mean that anyone is paying it attention—increasingly looks threadbare, because the fact is that many blogs are very popular and influential, in some cases more so than the conventional texts (books, newspaper articles) that they increasingly consider it their birthright to supplant. A battle for authority is being waged between the printed and the digital word, and this explains both the chippy, combative tone of many bloggers, with their talk of "people power" and it being "our turn now," and the defensiveness of many print journalists.
There is a third, perhaps less obvious reason for the diminishing importance of book reviews: the declining authority of academic criticism. This is a subject that Rónán McDonald—an English lecturer at Reading University—explores in his satisfyingly chewy new book The Death of the Critic (Continuum). In the past, McDonald points out, although by no means all successful critics were academics, there was a fruitful interplay between literary journalism and scholarship—something that has dwindled in recent years. There are exceptions: journals such as the London Review of Books and the TLS; the book sections of the Independent and, to an extent, the Guardian. But on the whole, journalists increasingly dominate the literary review pages of newspapers—and since an increasing number of books are written by journalists too, this results in a kind of circularity (which bloggers, quite reasonably, often moan about). But if literary journalism is increasingly feeding off itself, then, McDonald contends, that is largely because academic criticism has withdrawn from the field. In the last two decades, English literature has both tangled itself up in arcane and inaccessible debates about theory and emasculated itself by allowing itself to become a handmaiden to other disciplines, through its embrace of historicism and cultural studies. McDonald traces this retreat to a paradox that has always bedevilled the study of literature: the more Eng lit tries to prove that it is "rigorous," the more it cuts itself off from aesthetics—the original source of its attraction. The discipline has, in effect, worried itself into irrelevance.
One of the most disquieting things about the downgrading of book reviews is that it is happening at a time when serious print journalism generally is under threat: from other media (especially television and the internet), from diminished advertising revenues, from the growing number of free newspapers and trash magazines on the market. The old financial model of newspapers is looking increasingly unsustainable, and this makes it inevitable that editors and proprietors will start questioning—if they haven't done already—the worth of book reviews. What is their purpose? What value do they add? Such matters have clearly already been chewed over in the US—with, for literary journalism, deleterious consequences. In the long term, then, the prognosis for the book review—at least in its traditional form—doesn't look good. But what can literary journalism in Britain do to fend off the challenges to it, and thereby prevent—or at least postpone—its dereliction?
As I've already noted, one reason for the relative robustness of British newspaper book reviewing is the success it has had in co-opting new trends such as book groups and blogging. This is clearly the right way forward, but remains risky. Much of the bloggers' sting may be drawn by welcoming them into the family; but there is also a danger of print journalism disappearing into the new commentariat's forbiddingly capacious—and often angry—maw. The obvious course is to co-opt the best of the new forces while exploiting the advantages that print journalism still has over other media. Newspaper review sections should work harder to make themselves both highbrow and populist. Some genuflecting at the altar of celebrity is inevitable, but review sections should also strive to be less herdlike and more idiosyncratic. An example of the predictability of mainstream books reviewing was provided recently by the coverage of John Mullan's Anonymity. This enjoyable but slight history of anonymous authorship provided the lead essay in Saturday's Guardian "Review," the lead review in the following day's Observer and, again, the lead review in Monday's Evening Standard. The three editorial decisions were obviously taken independently of each other. But readers of these papers could have been forgiven for thinking that in this particular week no other book of any interest was published.
The concerns of those who venture to criticise the critics should not be dismissed, as was the case with Howard Davies's suggestion that reviews are too respectful. After all, he had a point. Few reviews buck the critical consensus or challenge long-inflated reputations. Review sections have a tendency to be cliquey. You do not have to have been immersed in the literary world all your life to spot this. However, excessive generosity is a problem that is in some ways endemic to book reviewing. Habitual reviewing exerts a downward pressure on the standards of even the most scrupulous critic: you can't be honest all the time, or you'd consign most things to the dustbin. Even so, pains should be taken to introduce a dose of spice and controversy into reviews. It is ironic, for example, that the one publication to feature a really hostile review of Ian McEwan's Saturday (by John Banville) was the New York Review of Books, which is often seen as the epitome of smug establishment liberalism.
Across fiction reviewing generally, in fact, there is considerable scope for improvement. This is, after all, the area of criticism where aesthetic judgements are not just desirable but necessary. In most review sections, much less space is given to fiction than to non-fiction, discouraging reviewers from tackling the big questions that novels raise—whether aesthetic or political. Reviewers rarely attempt more than a plot summary and some perfunctory reflections on style. Trends are rarely analysed. A supplementary argument for taking fiction reviewing seriously is that it might go some way to addressing that familiar complaint: "Where have all the critics gone?" In fact, there are still plenty around, and good ones too—it's just that no one pays them much attention. It says something that the two most important positions in literary journalism in America—the jobs of chief critic at the New Yorker and the Atlantic—are occupied by James Wood and Christopher Hitchens, both of whom are British-born. Even if America's newspapers no longer take book reviewing seriously, magazines do—which may help explain why two of our best critics have decamped.
Book reviews often display a certain sloppiness or complacency. Here are two recent examples. Reviewing Adam Thorpe's Between Each Breath in the Observer last year, Adam Mars-Jones, after noting a strain of environmentalism in the novel, wrote that, "it's surprisingly hard to bring green issues into fiction. For one thing, a book isn't in itself a planet-friendly object, requiring all sorts of materials and processes. Very few British books include recycled paper, and this doesn't seem to be one of them, which makes its concerns come across as insincere." This proposition is manifestly absurd: as if authors have any say in which type of paper gets used, as if they should refrain from broaching environmental questions until all books are printed on recycled paper. Or here is Philippe Sands reviewing The Bedside Guardian 07—a compendium of the best Guardian articles of last year: "I approached the task of commenting on The Bedside Guardian 07 with considerable trepidation. So much, in fact, that the original deadline… came and went. Of course I had excuses. Yet the truth is even more mundane…" As the American critic Wyatt Mason recently wrote: "To read a review that begins in the first person singular is like watching someone propose a toast to himself at a party thrown for another man." Even worse, the review was in the Guardian itself.
One thought that should console the upholders of print journalism is that while blogs make a great deal of fuss about being where the action is, they contain little decent criticism. It is rare to encounter good critical writing on the internet that didn't start life in print form. Lively literary websites—or online magazines with literary sections—do exist, especially in the US: Salon, Slate, the Literary Saloon. But blogging is best suited to instant reaction; it thus has an edge when it comes to disseminating gossip and news. Good criticism requires lengthy reflection and slow maturation. The blogosphere does not provide the optimal conditions for its flourishing.
In the end, though, the squabbles between literary journalists and bloggers miss the point. While both parties have cast themselves as adversaries in a pressing contemporary drama, they really are (or should be) allies in a more important battle—for literature itself, and its right to be taken seriously. The significance of this struggle makes the differences between them trivial. All those who care about how books are talked about need to be vigilant. Otherwise, before any of us quite realise it, one of the flames that lights our enjoyment of literature may be snuffed out.
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