Tuesday 22 October 2013

The Following (10) "There are examples of writing..."

There are examples of writing that only need to be broken up to draw attention to them, leaving the reader marvelling at having missed something in the square of a paragraph.

Here are the last few sentences of John Ruskin's article on Turner's engravings, The Harbours of England (1856), unaltered except for line breaks:


One great monotony, that of the successive sigh
and vanishing of the slow waves upon the sand,
no art can render to us.

Perhaps the silence of early light, even on
the "field dew consecrate" of the grass itself,
is not so tender as the lisp
of the sweet belled lips
of the clear waves in their following patience.

We will leave the shore
as their silver fringes fade upon it,
desiring thus, as far as may be,
to remember the sea.

We have regarded it perhaps too often
as an enemy to be subdued;
let us, at least this once, accept from it,
and from the soft light beyond the cliffs above,
the image of the state of a perfect Human Spirit -

"The memory, like a cloudless air,
The conscience, like a sea at rest."

Thursday 3 October 2013

The Following (9) "A good review..."

A good review does not have to be favourable from the author's point of view - some of my books' best reviews have expressed reservations while laying out the bones of the book fairly.

Having said that, the magnification an author can make of the tiniest admonition is tremendous.

Here are some guidelines for reviewers laid out years ago by John Updike: 

My rules, drawn up inwardly when l embarked on this craft, and shaped intaglio-fashion by youthful traumas at the receiving end of critical opinion, were and are:


1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation–at least one extended passage–of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author ‘in his place,’ making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

                  - from John Updike's Introduction to Picked-Up Pieces, 1977