The composer Sibelius famously claimed that “a statue has never been set up in honour of a critic”. He was wrong: whenever I bike through Fleet Street, I pass the bronze likeness of Samuel Johnson, who was not afraid of taking aim at venerable targets. Who could forget his judgment that Milton “could cut a Colossus from a rock, but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones”?
Two almost equally colossal figures – AA Gill and Morrissey – did fearsome battle over the musician’s autobiography, published as a Penguin Classic last year. Writing in The Sunday Times, Gill laid into the Manchester musician’s musings: “It is a heavy tome, utterly devoid of insight, warmth, wisdom or likeability. It is a potential firelighter of vanity, self-pity and logorrhoeic dullness.” For this pitiless takedown, Gill was this week awarded the Hatchet Job of the Year award, beating others including David Sexton on the Booker winner Eleanor Catton (“Catton never shows, she tells, wagging on in the most officious way”); Craig Brown on Frederic Raphael’s letters (“The first thing to be said about their exchanges is how extraordinarily unpleasant they are”); and the same Frederic Raphael on John le Carré (“he stretches his thrills with mixed clichés, idiosyncratic phrases ... and witless dialogue”).
At the prize-giving in Soho on Tuesday Anna Baddeley and Fleur Macdonald, the young guns who run the Omnivore website and who set up the prize two years ago, suggested that the honest critic is an endangered species. In rewarding Gill they were fighting the good fight. Sporting a bow tie, Gill gave an acceptance speech in which he compared critics to traffic wardens: “No one likes getting a ticket,” he said, “but without them there would be chaos.” He also reflected on the terrible reviews his own first novel had received. (The headline in one newspaper: “Don’t buy this book.”) He had taken it, he implied, and feels free to dish it out.
As it happens, here at Telegraph Books we liked some of the books bludgeoned by the Hatchet-wielders: we even gave Morrissey’s “pungent” and “pithy” memoir five stars. But that does not imply we are total pussy-cats, as anyone who read Tim Martin’s one-star verdict on the presciently titled Doomed by Chuck Palahniuk will testify.
The literary world is often accused of being cliquish and back-scratching. It is indeed a small world, and as an editor you might end up commissioning someone whose book you have previously trashed in your pages. Worse, you might end up meeting them. At last year’s Hay Festival, I was introduced to an author whose most recent novel I found headache-inducingly awful. I knew that he knew who I was, and what I had written. Instead of tipping his drink over my head, though, he was guilt-inducingly polite. I scuttled away as soon as possible.
Still, a bad book is a bad book. When I recently took a crack at Hanif Kureishi’s The Last Word (sample dialogue: “You are a succulent woman, juicy as a dolphin”) it meant I couldn’t in good conscience go to his book launch. It turned out to be packed with celebrities – VS Naipaul! Nigella Lawson! Salman Rushdie! I could have pretended it was 1987.
These are the painful sacrifices critics make – all in the interests of making sure we tell you, the reader, the truth as we see it. And keep our heads dry.
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