Since my high school days, I’ve been a voracious consumer of reviews – without ever really stopping to think about the philosophy of criticism, to be a bit high-toned for a moment (and no, I don’t think that phrase is an oxymoron), or without stopping to think about the plight of the reviewer; the underlying influences shaping the presentation of reviews; and what drives me to consume them in such numbers.

Even now, on a blurry Saturday morning, I still devour a plethora of newspaper reviews in the old casual fashion – running my eye over them in a cursory way, taking in a headline here, an emboldened opinion there. Reading them, that is, in an indecently short amount of time, and neither fully doing justice to the critics’ art or intentions, nor stopping to consider the institutional factors at work in the shaping or publication of those reviews. Is this how many people consume newspapers? I suspect so. Derelict though I doubtless am on these supine Saturdays, I fear I’m not alone in this omnivorous but essentially uncritical approach to a part of the newspaper that we invest, rightly or wrongly, with an influence disproportionate to its space.

When I was a publisher, I read the literary pages faithfully each weekend – keen for approbation for those books I was associated with; always hoping that my authors’ endeavours and commitment, not to mention the firm’s investment, would be rewarded. But I wasn’t reading them especially critically. I had written a few reviews myself for Australian Book Review, at Helen Daniel’s suggestion, but this was merely a toe in the water, so to speak. Then in 2001, following Helen’s untimely death, I became editor of ABR, after a brief flirtation with the life of a full-time author. Editing a magazine is a transforming business. It is also, I’m happy to say, every bit as creative and stimulating as publishing the books themselves. The transformation can take many forms – not entirely predictable ones, either. I didn’t imagine, back in 2001, that politics and current affairs would loom so large in the magazine’s changing profile or in my editorship. Publications such as ABR always need to change, to adapt, to do things differently – both aesthetically and intellectually. Otherwise they moulder and become complacent.

What I hadn’t expected was that my rather torpid interest in politics was going to come to the fore as the magazine, like the rest of liberal-minded Australia, tried to assimilate and cope with the policies and prejudices of the Howard régime and the neo-conservative orthodoxy it represents. I think, at least I trust, that ABR is a different magazine now – responding directly and unequivocally (though I hope always responsibly) to a range of issues such as asylum seekers, globalisation, US supremacism, cultural autonomy, lying in government, republicanism, changes in public education, and the so-called age of terror. These editorial directions are, to a large extent, a product of the age. No general magazine worth its salt could afford to ignore the New Right agenda and the controversies of the Howard years. (Of course, how the left responds to the fourth endorsement of Howard by the Australian electorate remains to be seen. Will it prompt bewilderment, disdain, or a creeping submission?)

There is a kind of consensus that these are not halcyon times for Australian fiction, despite the quality of any number of novels that appear in a particular year. Nor is our national poetry prospering critically or sales-wise in the way that it did in the 1970s. Just look at our newspapers and count the number of poetry reviews you get in a year. It’s a wonder the poets aren’t storming the head offices. ABR goes on publishing two or three articles in each issue – but we are not usual in this respect. Nor could I justify, more than once or twice a year, devoting leading space to poetry books. The serious heat, sales, and cultural energy focus on works in the area of politics, society, and current affairs. Just think of some of the key books that have excited most interest and controversy in recent years. One recalls David Marr and Marian Wilkinson’s Dark Victory, and Robert Manne’s Whitewash, and his target Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Not many novels or slim volumes make it into that category or excite such interest, regrettably. Any responsive and thoughtful magazine must adapt to these issues and publishing trends.

Just as I have been changed and to some extent re-politicised by my tenure as editor, I find myself much more engaged by the critical process per se – its influence, intricacies, potential, and limitations. I now do quite a bit of reviewing myself, both for ABR and other publications. I read masses of reviews for ABR, the commissioned and the unsolicited stuff that arrives every few minutes by email. I am also acutely conscious of the need to cultivate new critical talent. ABR, because of its profile, has a great opportunity to nourish new reviewers, and it is something we take seriously, as evidenced by our recent reviewing competition, which offered three cash prizes and future commissions to reviewers of fiction, non-fiction, and children’s books. But it was only recently that I began to reflect that criticism – such an influential genre – is one of the least self-critical and transparent literary forms. No other genre, I’m tempted to say, gets away with such liberties, smugness, or sloppiness. No other genre is so complacent, so conservative, so resistant to change. And this unreflective condition cannot be good for critics or readers alike.

Cases of self-examination are so rare as to be quoteworthy. In a recent article in The Weekend Australian (24–25 July 2004), Peter Craven remarked: ‘It’s an odd thing for a literary critic to stop and ask himself: Do we actually need literary criticism? … Who cares what sparkles for the critic who is just someone who feeds off the work of his betters, those who have the spark to create?’

Sometimes I’m surprised by our unquestioning response to criticism, by our automatic, fleeting regard for these workaday six-hundred worders.

Why is this? Why is it such a complacent caper? One factor, surely, is that reviewing is essentially a private, non-institutional sort of profession, though the word ‘profession’ is almost a misnomer here. The great majority of reviewers regard it as a ‘hobby’. Indeed, our new taxation laws encourage us to do so, unless we want to be taxed to high heaven.

Then there is the widespread perception – the stigma, almost – that reviewing is a modest little craft signifying not very much, thoroughly eclipsed by its heavyweight literary relations: the boisterous novel, the avuncular biography, the audacious memoir, the recherché book of poetry. Flaubert put it this way, in a letter to Louise Colet in 1853: ‘It doesn’t require much brain to be a critic: you can judge the excellence of a book by the strength of the punches it has given you and the time it takes you to recover from them.’ Only recently, I received an article from one of my senior contributors, who began his piece thus: ‘Although reviewing books is a humble enough task …’ Is it really so humble? Is this status deserved? And should we advertise the fact?

Let’s go back for a moment to George Orwell’s classic essay ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’, which was published in 1946. How little things have changed since Orwell’s ironic description of the average reviewer’s lugubrious lot:

If things are normal with him he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will be suffering from a hangover … Half hidden among the pile of papers is a bulky parcel containing five volumes which his editor has sent with a note suggesting that ‘they ought to go well together’. They arrived four days ago, but for forty-eight hours the reviewer was prevented by moral paralysis from opening the parcel. Yesterday in a resolute moment he ripped the string off and found the five volumes to be Palestine at the Cross Roads, Scientific Dairy Farming, A Short History of European Democracy, Tribal Customs in Portuguese East Africa, and a novel, It’s Nicer Lying Down, probably included by mistake. His review – 800 words, say – has got to be ‘in’ by midday tomorrow.

How often I think guiltily of Orwell when I hear myself say to a contributor ‘1200 words, say, by tomorrow week’.

Clearly, there are historical reasons for the reviewer’s amateur status. Few reviewers are taught or nurtured by other critics – or indeed by editors. Reviewers are expected to learn the ropes by osmosis, or example, or intuition, or by indiscriminate reading. Even the professional writing courses that have proliferated in recent years (a phenomenon that was unimaginable when I was going to university in the early 1970s) rarely offer units in book reviewing. If they do, it’s a minor part of the preparatory stream. A few months ago, I led a book-reviewing workshop at the Victorian Writers’ Centre (a stimulating daylong course that prompted some of the ideas essayed in this paper). Such courses are fairly rare, even at our admirable writers’ centres.

The life is grinding, tenuous, and poorly paid. I myself don’t find it a chore or dreary work (I regard it as a privilege), but perhaps if it were the only thing I did my attitude might change. (I hope not, but maybe that’s why I don’t do more of it.) There’s lots of competition, and even if one were to review a hundred books a year (Orwell’s benchmark: hard to achieve in a much smaller literary and media culture, and injurious to one’s health, I should have thought), it would be far from lucrative and often intellectually unchallenging. You’re on your own: a one-person, low-income cottage industry, a hostage to your telephone and computer. Even when the editor of a prestigious organ offers you more space than usual to write about an important new book, the response upon publication is generally muted or non-existent. No one writes and thanks you for the review. No one suggests that you are the Edmund Wilson or Christopher Ricks of your generation. If the review is hostile, there can be unpleasant repercussions, or an even more menacing silence. Should you be an author yourself, you may have to look over your shoulder next time your work is published. Should you be an academic, you may be woken at three in the morning by uneasy speculations as to who will assess your next Australian Research Council grant application.

Reviewers are, of course, subject to innumerable factors of which we are insufficiently mindful as we flick through the papers on those bleary Saturday mornings. And these are the factors that we, as a reading and writing community, should not ignore.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we face new challenges and hindrances to proper critical scrutiny of our literary diversity and talent. We also see a new set of opportunities that we will only maximise if we in turn become rather more critical, so to speak, of the critical process.

What are these new hindrances? Well, space for a start. ABR is strongly committed to giving critics the appropriate amount of room. The average length of our reviews is 1200 words. We never go below 750 words, and we publish relatively few ‘shorts’, the 100- or 200-word reviews that abound in our newspapers and even some of our better magazines. If a new book seems notable in literary or political terms, I am happy to give it 2000 words. Our readers are hungry for more discursive, less breathless critiques.

But ABR is atypical in Australia in this policy of publishing longer reviews. I’m sure you are all familiar with ‘shorts’. I’m not suggesting that reviewers can’t highlight books’ strengths and weaknesses in short reviews. But that’s all they can do – highlight them. I don’t think even a Cyril Connolly or Gore Vidal could adequately convey the richness and nuances of a great novel or a sprawling biography or history in a few hundred words. All you can do in a fiction review is summarise the plot and offer succinct guidance to the reader as to whether it measures up and is worth its $30 price-tag, while eschewing comment on the novel’s relation to the author’s previous work (surely a prime responsibility of any reviewer).

This new kind of punchy, truncated criticism is related to other phenomena that we see in our broader culture: the eclectic programming, the manic over-editing, the assumption that viewers become bored after five minutes of anything (an aversion to depth or sustained argument that may just pervade management), the tendentious sound-bite that has replaced explication; those grim column-length question-and-answer interviews with ‘personalities’ who are expected to nominate everything from their preferred Saturday night entertainment to their favourite tipple. What are we to make of a local innovation such as Critical Mass, which recruits three new armchair critics each week and requires them to summarise snappily and humorously (as well as allocating a certain number of stars) a wide range of art forms, including some way out of their ken? Ripeness of facile expertise is all. It all conduces to a kind of jerky impressionism or opinionation that isn’t required – that simply doesn’t have room – to engage in old forms of critical argument or exegesis.

How long, I wonder, before our newspapers will follow the trend already evident in some magazines and begin allotting stars to each book in their review sections? It’s neat, it’s convenient, it’s why we watch programmes such as The Movie Show. But I don’t think it’s particularly good for anyone in our literary culture, from readers to authors to critics. Even an excellent new media resource, which I will discuss later and which lists most reviews published throughout Australia each week, places a smiley or sullen face next to highly favourable or unfavourable reviews, as the cataloguers see them. (Interestingly, the smiley faces greatly outnumber the latter. Sometimes whole weeks go by without a single twenty-past-eight expression.)

Here, the nexus between criticism and promotion becomes worryingly manifest. Only a master of concision can do anything interesting or original in a 150-word ‘short’, yet these take up more and more space in our newspapers, even our better metropolitan ones. What incentive is there for a busy, ambitious critic needing to earn an income to devote much time to a book if she only has a paragraph to summarise it? The reliance on existing information and opinion is often apparent in these columns. We see the influence of the cover blurb, the sales sheet, and the author’s biography. To earn that modest income, these critics end up churning out more and more of these ‘shorts’ – at what cost to their technique?

D.W. Thorpe, publishers of the major trade magazine Australian Bookseller & Publisher, recently began publishing a weekly electronic guide to what’s being reviewed and by whom in Australian newspapers and magazines. I find it invaluable. It helps me to identify major books that have slipped through our net, and also those trade titles that have become such remorseless starry phenomena that they don’t really need more space in ABR.

I also find Media Extra (as it’s called) illuminating for a number of reasons, despite my earlier qualification. It highlights the deleterious rise of the shorts and the ubiquity of certain reviewers who write up to a dozen of them each week. In some of the smaller states, serviced (if that’s the mot juste) by only one newspaper, the literary pages are quite thin. Often there are only four or five book reviews, written by one or two people, frequently staffers, who duly reappear each week. The paucity of reviews is alarming, and surely derelict on the editors’ and proprietors’ part given the abundance of excellent publishing from which editors can choose. The narrowness of the base from which some editors commission their reviews is startling. This can’t be good for anyone: readers, authors, or reviewers.

Each month ABR is listed in Media Extra, and I’m pleased to report that this listing illustrates our policy of employing a wide variety of reviewers. Each month we commission articles up to forty different writers. We have hundreds on our books, and we are always looking for new ones. It’s usual for the overlap between successive issues of ABR to be no more than three or four writers. Last year, in ten issues, 225 people wrote for us. This year, with this summer issue, the figure reached 228. That’s as it should be. I’m not suggesting that we’re breaking new ground or setting new standards. But we don’t see this in all our newspapers (with certain honourable exceptions, such as The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald). This trend is surely unfortunate for readers who want diversity of styles and opinions.

Of course, this concentration of critical authority merely reflects the lamentable concentration of media ownership in Australia, which is so notorious as to need little elaboration here. Australians are becoming dangerously inured to a lack of choice in their newspapers – and, in many cases, a simple lack of an alternative to the News Corporation one. This quintessentially Australian phenomenon, full of risks for a democracy and a culture, didn’t even rate as an issue in the federal election. Why aren’t Australians more exercised by this signal lack of choice – by the fact that one man dominates more than half of our newspapers, and so much else? And here, of course, we are talking about someone with huge global interests that demonstrably influence editorial policies from time to time, as we saw during the Iraq War, when all 170 of his editors supported the ‘coalition of the willing’, quite a miraculous congruence of editorial opinion. (Correction: one Murdoch man, never quite identified, was said to have misgivings.)

I have mentioned the dubious link between criticism and promotion. We live in an age of mass promotion: corporate promotion, national promotion, self-promotion. Just look at the publicity material that governments produce, at great expense to taxpayers. Many authors now have personal websites intended to attract new readers. Publishers are adept at bombarding editors and opinion-makers with bumf about new titles. In the newspaper offices, journalists (desperate to fill those news pages and supplements) are increasingly reliant on the Internet and on the public relations material that spews out of their fax machines day and night. It all leads to a kind of sameness and predictability of information; and it surely encourages plagiaristic tendencies that can’t be good for anyone. This is something we see throughout the world, particularly in the US, where there have been some celebrated scandals and mea culpas in recent times, even at that august organ The New York Times. It has doubtless contributed to the worldwide diminution of confidence in newspapers, and to declining readerships throughout the world. (But it is only one factor, of course. Newspapers, like cultural magazines and liberal commentators, seem to have lost their clout, their confidence. The influence they possessed a generation ago no longer obtains. Exposés that would once have brought down inept or deceitful ministers disappear by midday, usually replaced by yet another sports story, the curse of the age. Nothing sticks, nothing matters: except for the business report. As one journalist put it to me recently, it’s as if we live in a post-integrity era.)

Only by distancing themselves, or at least becoming more suspicious of the gurus of PR and globalised information, will our newspapers foster new audiences. Similarly, only by firmly demarcating the borders between puffery and independent criticism will literary editors truly serve their critics and readers.

I am surprised at times by the assumptions that people make about ABR’s raison d’être. Perhaps those assumptions are connected to the general haziness about the critical function that I remarked on earlier. Recently, in Melbourne, I had a, shall we say, lively exchange of views with an intelligent and articulate woman who was critical of the paucity, as she saw it, of fiction reviews in ABR. I defended our record and pointed out that we publish half a dozen such reviews in each issue and generally cover in a normal year about half the novels published in this country. But my critic wasn’t satisfied and pressed on. She wanted more fiction. After all, she pointed out, our role was ‘promotional’. Tacit in all this was a suggestion that because we receive federal funds, through the Australia Council (without which ABR couldn’t function on its present scale, modest though it is), we are specially obligated.

Never had it been put so baldly or so confidently. It surprised me, I must say, which may strike some readers as naïve. Perhaps you agree with my cocktail-party critic. But I’ve never seen ABR as primarily promotional. Indeed, I found the suggestion distasteful. One hopes, naturally, that ABR will foster a broader appreciation of the strengths and diversity of our writers. One hopes that ABR won’t have an adverse impact on sales. But exclusively promotional? I don’t think so. And nor, I’m pleased to say, do my board or my senior contributors. But that is one view of criticism in this country, and maybe it’s a popular one.

Another problem facing critics in this country is the smallness not just of our literary pages but of the literary culture itself. We all tend to know one another; being human, we form opinions based on a multiplicity of impressions. If you knock around in the literary, academic, and publishing worlds for a few years, you end up establishing a large number of acquaintances, some of which turn into friendships. Should we review these friends and acquaintances? And should we, having agreed to do so, return their books if we find that we dislike them? That’s a common quandary among my reviewers, some of whom decide that it’s improper, or unwise, or too delicate for words.

Even Patrick White was reluctant to entertain the notion. In a letter to David Malouf, he wrote: ‘I was sent An Imaginary Life by a bossy woman called Anne Summers who wanted me to review it for the Nat. Times, but as I’ve never reviewed a book, and would not like to start now, particularly with a friend’s, I sent it back.’ It’s interesting that even this most combative of men baulked at the idea of reviewing a friend – though god knows this and other missives published in David Marr’s edition of the letters proves that White was reviewing them in more private and excoriating ways all his life.

By opting not to write about acquaintances, for what may seem like shrewd or honourable reasons, perhaps our reviewers reduce the critical pool and betray a certain ideal of the critical life.

Then there is the tendency to hedge reviews with sententious preambles that are seemingly meant to induce a kind of awed languor in the reader. These lengthy and obscure introductions, which often draw on Nietzsche or Wittgenstein or the French philosophers, proclaim the critics’ superior knowledge while postponing direct engagements with the text. Any rightminded editor promptly excises these facile borrowings and evasions, whose flattening function is to conceal unfamiliarity with the text or the genre; to signal to peer-wolves across the valley; or simply to becloud dislikes.

Recently, I was asked what I would do if someone submitted a review that opened thus: ‘Here is a book so dull a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.’ I told him I would kill to publish stuff like that. It comes, of course, from Clive James’s immortal review of Brezhnev: A Short Biography, written by (wait for it) the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee.

Another example from my personal desideratum: here is Bernard Shaw (incomparable stylist and critic) beginning his review of a piano recital in 1890: ‘By the time I reached Paderewski’s concert on Tuesday last week, his concerto was over, the audience in wild enthusiasm, and the pianoforte a wreck.’ I defy anyone not to want to read on after an opening like that. No moralising, no philosophising, no cant – just vividness and curiosity, brilliantly exemplified.

Australians have long been proud of their larrikin tradition. One national stereotype presents us as direct, outspoken, no-nonsense, fond of plain talk. Sometimes literary editors would like to see a bit more of this in print. It’s not always easy to find someone who is prepared to say what he or she really thinks, especially when the book in question is written by someone with a vaunted reputation. Recently, Australian critics have been accused of circumspection bordering on self-censorship. Where, the malcontents ask, is our Dale Peck (whoever he is) or Andrew O’Hagan? They recall fondly A.D. Hope’s dismissal of Patrick White’s The Tree of Man and wish that our contemporary critics weren’t so inhibited. They don’t mind a bit of blood with their croissants.

This attack is exaggerated, in my view. We have many critics who are capable of exposing flawed books in cogent ways. During my time at ABR, I have commissioned a few reviews that have made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up but that I have happily published because of their quality and critical aplomb. It hasn’t always been pleasant, and it’s got us into a spot of bother, but it prompted useful debates and thoroughly engaged our readers.

Nevertheless, perhaps the critics who are waspish or severe when they need to be aren’t as plentiful as we like to think. We think of ourselves as frank and fearless, but Australia hasn’t produced anyone remotely like Kenneth Tynan, who could burnish or tarnish a reputation in a phrase. How much he tells us in lines as deft as ‘[Noël] Coward took the fat off English comic dialogue; he was the Turkish bath in which it slimmed’, and ‘[Ethel Merman], in whose hands musical comedy became a martial art’. But then, Tynan, whose motto was ‘Be light, stinging, insolent, and melancholy’, was rather more aggressive than most hacks can afford to be. Here’s what he had to say about his profession: ‘A critic’s job, nine tenths of it, is to make way for the good by demolishing the bad’; and ‘attack, not apology, passion, not sympathy, should lie behind the decorous columns of our drama critics.’

There are many reasons for tempering one’s criticisms of a book, and I’ve heard most of them from frank contributors. Telling the truth, telling one’s own brand of truth, may seem less than prudent or diplomatic. Most critics who don’t traffic in flattery or the anodyne soon experience the wrath of their more precious subjects. We have all known that kind of ill feeling, whether overt or of the sullen kind. Sometimes it costs us friendships, or puts them on hold until the dyspepsia wears off. Some critics early conclude that it’s all too bothersome, and withdraw from the field. Others, fortunately, persevere, believing that something more is at stake than social convenience.

It all goes, I suppose, to the question as to where our greatest responsibility lies as critics. Is it to the reader, the author, posterity, one’s literary editor, ‘the market’, one’s nationality, the broader culture? Are we entertainers or sceptics or doomsters or commercial spruikers, like the bright-voiced optimists who stand outside gaudy boutiques and try to lure shoppers inside? Are we there to help sell books or to analyse them? Should we hesitate to pull a shoddy Australian work apart knowing that its author faces major competition from abroad? (Here, many of us sense that film, television, and drama critics tend to adopt milder standards when discussing Australian works, because of their general endangerment – a politeness or timidity that does not generally obtain in letters, I’m happy to say.)

Well, I believe that our ultimate responsibility is to the work itself – the novel, the slim volume, the memoir, the play, the film – not to its hopeful maker, intended audience, or national honour. Only by steeping oneself in the work and surrendering, unfettered by external considerations, to the intimate, complex, and testing process of discrimination and judgment is the critic able to fulfil her fundamental responsibility: which is, as I see it, to do justice to a book and to assess its contribution to our collective literature – not whether it’s ‘a towering work of imagination’ or ‘an instant modern classic’ or any of those gruesome phrases we read far too often, but whether it measures up, whether it adds to the body of world literature, and whether, in a sense, it will help us to live. Only by having the space and confidence to give in to the core of the book, to the author’s real intention, both moral and artistic – and so often unguessed-at by the artist or the blurb-writer or the publicist – only then, I think, do we attain a sophisticated critical position. Only then do we really start to empathise and criticise – and, yes, maybe even promote our literature, in the true sense of the word.

This is an edited version of the 2004 Barry Andrews Lecture, which Peter Rose delivered in September at the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy.