realthog

So there I was minding my own business tonight when into my mailbox popped this:

Just finished reading The Far Enough Window [a novel I wrote a dozen or so years ago] for the purpose of writing a review.

I found the book fascinating up to a point. The point is the place where Joanna returns to what she thinks is her present time and sees herself lying in the bed. The problem for me were all the alternating dimensions, I guess you'd call them, considering she was first one place, and then another enough different times as to cause confusion. Having finished the book, I see no reason for all of those alternating scenes, broken in places by other scenes, always returning to her in the house as the truth for Joanna comes to light. Not only do those scenes seem unnecessary and confusing, they also slow down the story.

I don't mean to be harsh. I only mean to let you know what one reader thinks.

The instinctive reaction of any sentient author, on receiving this kind of unsolicited insult, is to write back a measured response somewhat along the lines of the late Abigail Frost's patented expression:

Fuck off and die.

Me, though, I've spent a small fortune on online courses to help me improve my social skills, so I knew I should strive for something a bit mellower, a bit more considered -- something more like

Please fuck off and die.

In the end, of course, I did nothing this crass. I sent a reply so dripping with cordiality, courtesy and sincerity you coulda puked:

Thank you for your note.

I'm not 100% sure, to be honest, why you're writing in advance of your review to let me know your opinions, but I'm grateful nevertheless.

"Not only do those scenes seem unnecessary and confusing"

I should hope they're confusing; I very much disagree that they're unnecessary. I was trying to do a little more with the novel than just produce an amiable yarn.

I was offering a bit of yer tactful here. The novel was an attempt -- during an era when every fantasy story involving Fairyland was about the cruel, incomprehensible Sidhe -- to reclaim for fantasy the Fairyland of the Victorian authors; I wasn't trying to demolish what the other fantasists were doing, just to make sure that something I thought had a wonderful vitality of its own wasn't lost. There were a few references to Carroll and Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking-glass involved (these were picked up mightily by most of the book's few reviewers) and buckets more to the works, for both children and adults, of the great George MacDonald (these were largely ignored or unperceived by the reviewers). However, the novel's by no means simply a recursive work; rather, it's a metafiction, in that one of its significant concerns is to comment on the nature of fantasy literature itself. O' course, I hoped to keep all that heavy stuff back for when the reader thought about things later, so I gave the book the subtitle: A Fairytale for Grown-Ups of All Ages.

One reviewer cottoned on precisely to what I was doing -- the Foundation's librarian Andy Sawyer (

andysawyer) -- and the rest, usually in abashingly flattering terms, treated the book as a more straightforward fantasy novel/fairytale, even as they quite clearly understood there was something a bit more going on. (No criticism implied: my intention was that it work on this level too.)

Whatever, I was startled by tonight's correspondent's attitude, which struck me as displaying the kind of blithe arrogance you expect from pre-adolescents whose minds are aswim with the realization that they've finally learned how to read without moving their lips. This wouldn't have been my interpretation had I come across the opinion in a published review: then I'd simply have shaken my head wryly, a wistful half-smile toying with the fringes of my mouth as I whispered -- but who might hear? -- the immortal words of Kilgore Trout: So it goes. You gotta learn to take the dimwits with the smooth.

(As you may have guessed, I don't belong to that auctorial school which regards adverse reviews as things from which one might learn.

(Well, you learn something: you learn who'd be best to put first up against the wall come the revolution . . .)

After sending my almost unendurably seemly note, I found an idle moment and did some googling. My correspondent proved to be not the bubbly high-school cheerleader pubertoid I'd assumed but someone who is, at least to guess from her photo, in her 30s -- a presumed grownup, in other words. She has a blog which purports to review.

The subjects are . . . well, the first review I encountered was of a book of Bible stories for kids, so I knew I wasn't going to be compulsively seeking out the RSS feed option.

Reading on down, I found there were items about a few fantasy novels of the kind I'm never going to read and then -- huzzah -- a review of a movie Pam and I watched recently, Gone, Baby, Gone. We thought it was a surprisingly good movie, even though this expatriate Brit could often have done with subtitles. (Laugh derisively? Right: Next time I see you I'll give you a dose of raw Aberdonian. That's the English language too, fit rod wid ye think it wisnae.)

I boggled a tad at my correspondent's review, however. My memory of the movie isn't overwhelmingly sharp -- we were watching it late at night just for fun rather than with critical faculties akimbo -- but I do recall that the character played by Amy Madigan, the person who commissioned our somewhat numb P.I.s to find a kidnapped child, was not the child's grandmother but her aunt. And then next I came across a smug, nudge-nudge, I'm-an-insider-type hint that the movie's star Casey Affleck might be the son of its director Ben Affleck; what's bizarre here is not the ignorance of the fact that they're brothers but the obliviousness to the idea that it might be a bright idea to check in, say, Wikipedia or the IMDB before trying to play the smartypants.

What really got to me, though, came next. It seems Ed Harris's claim to fame is that he was good in The Abyss, although he's appeared in some damn' fine movies since. This is kind of like saying that Tilda Swinton was true triff in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and not bad in her various other movies.

The point of all this is not to defend my novel (contact me offlist and I'll tell you how wonderful it really is) and not even to mock someone who thought it was her Christian duty to e-mail me for purposes of gratuitous unpleasantness, but to demonstrate that, while the information revolution that has come about through the rise of the internet has probably overall had beneficial effects, one of its detrimental aspects has been the precipitous decline in the average standard of reviewing. Note the word "average": the best reviewers are still ace, whether they appear online or in print (and some of the best of all might never have been discovered by the old media); the average has been dragged radically downward not because of any deterioration of the best but because of the extraordinary proliferation of the worst.

One of the advantages of the old media was that it cost money for someone to publish a review; they therefore expected reviewers to meet some kind of professional standard, however low. And low that professional bar very often was; but at least one knew that a review in (to use UK examples) the Exeter Express and Echo was likely to be less reliable than one in the Independent. Nowadays we're very often choosing between one blog and another; far more importantly, the corporate book-industry gods who decide whether authors' careers thrive or die, whether authors pay their mortgages or suffer foreclosures, are increasingly relying on the views of people who're unwilling to test those views against anyone other than themselves.

Don't believe me? Consider how important the Amazon reader review has become despite the known enormous corruption in this area. Before, say, Hillary Clinton's memoir was published it built up an impressive number of adverse reviews on Amazon, all written by people who could not possibly have read the book by the time they were writing their review. (The one that made me giggle a lot was by the dittohead who claimed he'd found the book so bad his friendly local bookseller had taken it back from him and refunded the money. Yeah, right.) All those reviews were complete fiction; yet, somewhere, they'll have been totted up by a mindless computer and believed important by a mindless Borders buyer . . . or perhaps I'm being tautological.

It's possible, I suppose, that my correspondent was hoping to initiate some kind of literary debate; but I think this is not so. My guess is that she was trying to play a power game: I should have cringed and supplicated on receiving her stern warning.

Well, dammit, I'm proud of The Far-Enough Window, so my response to this sort of bully-pulpit stuff is . . . hey, shucks, I quoted it above . . . a resounding

Fuck off and die.