the people's revolution reaches Baroque Towers

Sorry, this is out of date already. Baroque in Hackney never posted on the recent kerfuffle about literary blogs, online reviews and the hallowed halls of the Books Pages, but those of you who frequent the blogosphere will know that Ms B couldn't resist commenting on it absolutely everywhere. It got a bit embarrassing.

Well, to embarrass myself again, it seems that critic John Sutherland's original piece from the Telegraph, the one that started the whole cyclone spinning in the teacup, has been available online for over a week. Now I've read it, which (in typical blogger fashion, I can hear Sutherland saying now) I hadn't before. (Mind you, if Ellis Sharp from The Sharp Side is to be listened to - notwithstanding he's a blogger - that scruple needn't worry me overmuch.)

The article is mostly about the reviews that readers write for eg Amazon. Sutherland feels these people have too much power, a power he cites as being able to "move books." They do it through psychokinesis, without, apparently, knowing much about books, or honouring the Reviewers' Code ('more like guidelines') which makes paid reviewers back up their assertions with knowledge and quotations. One such inflated personage is a man apparently listed as amazon.com's 250th-ranked reviewer! Ms B feels giddy just thinking about it. Naturally Baroque Towers is beautiful, but it is not yet quite so lofty as all that.

What puzzled me was the reaction online, among bloggers who are also professional writers, publishers etc, who seemed - wilfully, it appeared to me - to ignore the fact that they were signally not who Sutherland had in mind, and to take enormous personal offence at what he had written - even citing their educational and publishing credentials, though that sits oddly with the brutal populism of which they are accused. The phenomenon of professional or published writers and critics blogging away in their off hours has not been addressed at all in the "real" press, that I know of. I guess it makes little odds; if a powerful (though not amazon-registered) critic is saying that all e-criticism is tosh, one has to stick up for one's fellow byte-sized wryters. It's noble, and it is a Code of a different sort.

Anyway, I followed the whole thing all over the place, - at Susan Hill, the Tart of Fiction, and normblog, and Me and My Big Mouth, and other places too, I'm sure - piping up about the importance of critical analysis as a beacon of good living, and the spuriousness of any People's Revolution based on mere opinion (well, I didn't put it quite like that)*, and basically stuck up for silks and velvets and buckles on our shoes. The debate was a bit vitriolic, and when Rachel Cooke published this piece in the Observer she made it even worse. But much of the offence she caused was based on the fact that - like all the other commentators before her - she completely failed to distinguish between what is trying to sell books and what is trying to analyse art. (She did say, among other things, that there is nothing in a literary blog that is even one-millionth as good as anything in Nick Hornby's new book - I forget what it's called. And she wrote that in the Observer. So it must be true.)

Sutherland and Cooke are both right, of course, when they say we need, badly need, and can't do without, the art of critical analysis. Literature is borne aloft on criticism, in the same sense as Socrates' dictum about the unexamined life being not worth living. And as literature is about, and is a synthesis of, life, it does sort of follow that deep, perceptive, nuanced criticism of it will cast a glow of understanding on our quotidian existence. You know - durrr.

"Moving" books is another. Clearly it is to be lauded if it gets people interested in reading literature and living an examined life, and all that - though Ms Baroque has never bought the whole philosophy that it is better to be reading anything at all, no matter what, than to be doing anything else at all. I read Main Street; I couldn't bear to finish it. Simply enthusing about books is another. Anyone who likes them can do that. And stabbing authors in the back with specially sharpened 'reviews' is yet another. But does no one do that in the papers?

Anyway, the reason I am writing all this now is that I have just - yes, behind the times - read a very comprehensive and satisfying account of the whole fracas, over at the complete review's Literary Saloon.


*I think the great anarchist Emma Goldman said something like "If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution"; and Jessica Mitford got in trouble with the Communist Party in California in the forties for wearing hats and gloves when she leafleted on their behalf. You know, I love that people can start their own blogs and write about books! I just can't stand it when they punctuate badly.