Monthly Archives: August 2013

Recently the latest edition of one of Scotland’s bright new literary magazines dropped through the letterbox. Its arrival is something I look forward to. The magazine is not light reading – 170 pages dense with new poetry and short fiction, lots of black on white, writers of all ages and at all stages – but is well worth the effort if you want to know who is doing what in contemporary Scottish literature.

Eventually I will work my way through all of it and find (if past editions are anything to go by) good writers, promising writers, and a few whose work I’ll pass over rather quickly. I always begin my exploration, however, in medias res because that’s where the book reviews are. These pages would catch the eye anyway as they are the only part of the magazine that is in colour: a rather fetching and (as it turns out) appropriate sky blue in this edition.

The reviewers use pseudonyms that favour literary birds and animals – Kes, Tarka the Otter, Bear of Little Brain etc. This should provide the perfect cover (pun intended) for forthright assessment. The reviews are well-written and engaging and appear to be by people who know of what they speak. However, after while a pattern emerges. If you read the first novel reviewed here ‘the way that you look at [the world] will have changed’; the second is ‘an extraordinary clever enterprise’; the first short story collection is ‘highly accomplished’; poetry collections are invariably ‘assured’ or ‘inventive’ or ‘rich’. I glanced back at a previous edition in case the reviews in this one were anomalous, but there’s it is again: ‘enthralling and compelling poetry’, ‘work that is enjoyable and admirable’, ‘clever, uncomfortable novel’, ‘an indefatigable chimera of a book’ etc.

There are, of course, contexts and quibbles in the reviews that these short extracts don’t represent. There is even the odd review that seems to be edging towards the negative before the author realizes where it is going and recovers it. Read collectively, however, the reviews give the impression that most books published in Scotland these days are somewhere between good and great. A trip to the Scottish Poetry Library to examine other new (or newish) Scottish literary magazines that include reviews reveals that this is the standard way. Just about everybody likes just about everything.

So, are we in the grip of another Scottish literary renaissance? It would certainly be nice to think so. There is much to celebrate in Scottish literature these days including, incidentally, the number of fine new literary magazines both in print and online. But is everything as good as the reviews suggest or are there other factors at work? Perhaps animal-names don’t really provide much cover and nobody wants to risk getting stink eye at future literary events; or the reviewers are writers themselves and sense that the roles could easily be reversed; or everyone who reviews for these new magazines is just a nice person and doesn’t want to cause unnecessary hurt; or reviewers are assigned books they are predisposed to like; or the majority of people who gather around new literary magazines are young and less prone to cynicism than those who have been in the reviewing business for years.

I would like to think, however, that the explanation isn’t just circumstantial and that there is a broader philosophy at work. In an article in The Atlantic called ‘Book Reviews: A Tortured History’, Sarah Fay alludes to the fact that book reviews have often been seen as either too positive or too negative. On the too positive side, she cites Poe (‘We place on paper without hesitation a tissue of flatteries, to which in society we could not give utterance, for our lives, without either blushing or laughing outright’) and Elizabeth Hardwick (‘Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns’).

Hardwick herself had a reputation as a ‘snippy’ reviewer though perhaps not when compared to – say – John Gibson Lockhart who eviscerated Keats’s ‘Endymion’ in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Lockhart’s review was originally published under the pseudonym ‘Z’ and ended with some advice for the young poet/apothecary: ‘It is a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills and ointment boxes..’

Scotland does not lack for a disputatious tradition in book reviewing, but is it being replaced by a new reviewing culture that accentuates the positive?  The new way (if that is what it is) would certainly have met with John Updike’s approval. Fay cites Updike as supporting ‘the nice-guy approach to book reviewing, one that favoured and coddled the author and limited the reviewer’.  She paraphrases his ‘rules of reviewing’ as:

1.       Don’t review books that you have any personal connection to

2.       Quote the book

3.       Quote the book

4.       No spoilers

5.       Quote the book

6.       Review the book, not the authors reputation

7.       Praise unsparingly

8.       Leave tradition, school of criticism and political/social ideas out of it.

9.       Remember that books are meant to be enjoyed

10    Quote the book

For the record, I have no idea where I place on the positive/negative scale. Friends occasionally tell me that I was too nice to this or that book, but I also have a three page letter from an author who considered me too thick to appreciate his genius and an e-mail from another referring me to reviews of his book that he thought more enlightened than mine.  In an age where creative writing courses and writer’s groups have made writing more of a team sport and less of a lonely pursuit, where the number of writers constantly increases while publishing options shrink, why not try to be supportive and positive when reviewing new work? And if there is an occasional hankering for a perfectly executed literary skewering or the sight of a reviewer fending off an angry writer in an Edinburgh howff, so be it. The past, as they say, is a foreign country.