Offshore havens

The world of books is small, which can cause problems for reviewers. Ian Jack can guarantee objectivity

This fine new section of the Guardian is mainly devoted to book reviews, which, if you believe books to be important or at the very least interesting, is an absolutely commendable thing.

The pages that follow this one allow more space for the notice and discussion of books than any other national newspaper - more probably (I haven't counted the column inches) than even the New York Times and its special Sunday book supplement.

The Guardian takes books seriously. Hurrah again.

I imagine it's expensive; publishers are notoriously mean advertisers, who, long ago, reached the view that what sells books is their prominent, piled availability in chain bookstores (the attainment of which costs publishers money in discounts and various other sweeteners) rather than full-page ads with endorsements by the prominent authors of the day.

But I have thought of a way of making it even more expensive - more expensive, but uniquely trustworthy. The Guardian should buy an island. The island should be remote from London; the Outer Hebrides will do. The crofters there should be evicted with generous compensation. The island should be renamed - Greater Judgment or Little Personal Connection; either would be good. The crofts should be repopulated with book reviewers, who will receive all living expenses plus an excellent rate (a pound a word) for their reviews.

Their books and other small luxuries (Marmite, Oxford Marmalade) will arrive by courier. Every review submitted will be accompanied by a legal document - there will be a lawyer on the island, a Mr McFee - in which the reviewer swears on oath that he knows neither publisher, nor author, nor author's agent; neither is he or she planning or already writing a rival work; neither does he or she seek the approval of the author under review for reason or reasons unknown. The reviewers will be allowed to leave the island occasionally, but they will be tagged, as criminals are. If any reviewer travels south of Watford, an amber light will flash at Guardian HQ, followed by a red alert and a loud buzzing noise if the reviewer is detected within certain London districts: Soho, Bloomsbury, Kensington, the Vauxhall Bridge Road.

That will mean the sack, a life thereafter as an un-reviewer. Eviction men will gather at the croft door and post a notice: Dunreadin.

In this way, any taint of what is sometimes called the "corruption" of the London literary world will be abolished and the Guardian's Review section may take its place alongside the Consumer Association's guide to the best fridges. Would it be worth it? Mainly not; mainly, book reviewers and book-page editors are driven by honourable intentions to be fair, just and interesting in their criticism. But sometimes even in the best-run pages a review will appear which to anyone inside the trade will prompt the thought: something odd is going on here, something not quite right, something extra-textual.

Sometimes this will be manifest in the stormy biliousness of the review - what Salman Rushdie has called the "bitchiness" of London. More often, and contrary to the Rushdie view, it will be the harder-to-detect sound of a punch being pulled, or what in other areas of journalism is known as the top-of-the-bus paragraph, something that stands out from the rest of a sceptical piece for its friendly praise, written in case you meet the subject of the piece on the top of a number 19. And, in the case of a review, very handy for the jacket of the forthcoming paperback.

Long ago, Penelope Gilliatt wrote that Britain awoke on a Sunday morning "to the familiar sound of Harold Hobson barking up the wrong tree". Hobson was the drama critic of the Sunday Times; his judgment of plays was sometimes eccentric, but it was always sincere. The sincerity was enabled because Hobson, like many other theatre critics then and now, rarely met actors, playwrights or producers. He was paid a full-time salary to go to the theatre several times a week, see the first night from the stalls, and then rise on a Friday and write his thoughts on what he had seen. That system still pertains to a large extent with his successors in drama reviewing, as with television and the cinema. A useful distance is preserved between the reviewer and the reviewed. The life of many book reviewers isn't like that.

Perhaps it never was; perhaps, short of the island solution, it can't be. For a start, there is the question of money. No newspaper so far as I know pays any reviewer a full-time salary; freelance book reviewing makes nobody rich. Book reviewers have other jobs - academics, or journalists - or are fully-fledged novelists or non-fictionalists. Second, the social phenomenon known as "literary London" is not very large.

There are parties, lunches, festivals. People bump into each other. Sometimes they share agents, sometimes editors. There is drink. Human feelings exist. I don't write as Angry Man from Dundee, with a rejected novel in the top drawer - I enjoy all the above - but you will get the picture. A reviewer has given a famous novelist a good review. The famous novelist comes to London. The reviewer gets an invite (jolly good!) and has an interesting time with the novelist, who seems an extremely nice woman. Of course, the reviewer can't be "bought" with this kind of treatment.

Nonetheless, when the author's next novel is given to him for review - and it may not be so good as the previous one - his feelings towards the writer are bound to be more complicated than they were the first time around. The fact is that producers and what would be called consumer watchdogs in other fields of industry are in the book trade inextricably mixed up - often, not always. The wonder, you may feel, is not that dogs bark up the wrong tree, but that any dogs bark at all.

There is a benefit: kindness. As the novelist Richard Ford has said, "Writing even a bad book is hard work." Nobody who has struggled in front of a screen or paper for three years deserves a pasting written in half a day by a 23-year-old, though the pasting might be justified in terms of what exists on the page.

But think of the author, the editor, the publisher's high hopes of the enterprise and you would think twice about writing an unkind review ever again. To know any of them makes it almost impossible. Though not a regular book reviewer, I suppose I must have written 100 and more reviews. I now have rankings of difficulty.

At the top: you know the author and don't like the book. Then: you know the author and do like the book. Followed by: you don't know the author and don't like the book. And finally: you don't know the author and do like the book. As we are never going to get the Hebridean island of critical standards, I am trying to make the last category the only one I'll touch. Piety in the sky, maybe, but a great ease on the conscience.

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