The World of Books

It's a jungle out there

So how important, when all is said and done, are book reviews? Opinions vary. Byron, for example, who once ordered his publisher to 'send me no more reviews of any kind', scoffed that Keats had been 'snuffed out by an article', killed by one bad review.

Johnson, on the other hand, thought that it was good for a book to be attacked as well as praised. Literary fame, he informed one whingeing Scots author, is a shuttlecock which has to be batted backwards and forwards.

Who knows? Some writers develop rhinoceros hides. Kingsley Amis wisely observed: 'You should let a bad review ruin your breakfast but not your lunch'. Professor John Sutherland, writing passionately in the Guardian last week, opened up a hoary debate by giving it a characteristically fresh new spin. He argued that 'killer previews' and 'early reviewing' (ie in advance of publication day) now meant that 'books don't get a fair shake'.

Taking as his text the example of the unkind critical commentary lavished on Christopher Ricks's magisterial study, Dylan's Visions of Sin (Penguin), Sutherland argued, I think, that three 'early' reviews of Ricks (in The Observer, the Sunday Telegraph and the Sunday Times) had reduced Ricks, who has spent 30 years working on this volume, to a grease spot and rendered his newborn book 'dead on arrival'.

I wonder. Somerset Maugham, infinitely experienced in the ways of Grub Street, used to hand out a simple piece of advice to tremulous authors: 'Don't read your reviews, dear boy. Measure them.' On that calculation, Ricks should be cracking open the Bollinger.

Sutherland asks: 'Will booksellers, having read the killer previews, order in quantity or display this pre-certified crap?' The truth is that even so-called 'early reviews' come in far too late to trouble the book trade. Dylan's Visions of Sin will already have been processed through the warehouse. Booksellers will long ago have banked the money publishers pay them for window displays and committed themselves to their initial orders.

Scores of column inches in three national broadsheets, even lukewarm column inches, will not have book sellers screaming with joy, but they will have noted the colossal space devoted to the book and congratulated themselves on ordering quantities of a book that their customers will now at least have heard of. That's Maugham's point: better to be noticed than ignored and (up to a point) all publicity is good publicity.

Even if we accept Sutherland's debatable claim that Ricks was 'murderously reviewed' (am I alone in catching a barely audible squeak of schadenfreude?) by three Sunday newspapers, will that stop fans of Bob Dylan and admirers of Christopher Ricks from buying Dylan's Visions of Sin? I don't think so.

What's more, in the pre-Christmas bonanza, for which the publication of Ricks's alleged turkey was unquestionably timed, will John Carey's verdict that the book is 'cock-eyed', or Sean O'Hagan's opinion that it is 'a mess', have any significant impact on its sales or its reception? If only Sunday newspapers could be so powerful.

Perhaps if three Sunday broadsheets and three television book programmes and three influential radio stations were simultaneously to pronounce Dylan's Visions of Sin a 'cockeyed mess', then Ricks's baby could be certified DOA, but at the moment of writing, this has not happened. Far from it.

The infamous 'early reviews' have actually inspired a debate, of which this column and Sutherland's are a part, which will be settled in the course of time by Dylan fans, by book groups and, finally, by word of mouth.

It might be comforting to think that book reviewers are a supreme court, with the power of life and death, sitting in permanent session, but, in my experience, books are remarkably immune to newspaper coverage. When it comes to the regulation of Grub Street, I believe we are at best traffic wardens, not JPs. It's a free-for-all out there.

I have seen books praised to the skies that have scarcely troubled the check-out clerks at Borders or Hatchards. I have watched books comprehensively ignored by The Observer, the Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph being lugged out of Waterstone's, Books etc, Ottakars and Menzies by the bagload.

Books in which publishers have invested thousands of pounds of advertising fall still-born from the press. And then books such as Clare Morrall's Astonishing Splashes of Colour find their way into the hands of independent-minded imprints such as the Tindall Street Press and get shortlisted for the Booker Prize, with little or no help from the Sunday Times, or the Sunday Telegraph, or even - dare I say? - The Observer.

robert.mccrum@observer.co.uk

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