It seems to have all begun with me saying – innocuously as I naïvely thought – that the gap between literary fiction and the kind of work Colleen McCullough and Bryce Courtenay produced was at least as great as the gap between the films of James Cameron and the films of Martin Scorsese.

At the time it appeared to be erring on the side of generosity to compare the author of Tommo and Hawk to the techno wizard of Titanic and the Schwarzenegger films, but it wasn’t enough for Bryce. Reviews, he said, ‘hurt like buggery’; they, he assured us, were like having his scrotum cut off.

And what added insult to injury was that of 114 reviews he had received all but thirteen were favourable and the thirteen stinkers, the ‘excrementious’ reviews, as our wordsmith called them, had all been written by Australians. It may be true that a smile of national pride passed over my lips and those of Peter Pierce, but the offended author would not let up. Here, he said with feigned jocosity, was a bit of a particularly nasty review ‘by an obscure academic called Pierce’, and he proceeded to quote Peter Pierce saying words to the effect that the prose of Tommo and Hawk was so incompetent it was disarming. To some members of the audience, these quoted words seemed to have the unmistakeable ring of truth (and to also be funny), but it has to be admitted that the fans of Bryce were also there in some number, and they hissed at the perfidy of the scribes who dared to question Courtenay during the subsequent discussion.

That discussion, as it has been reported, has tended to sound like a standard stoush between the popular writer and the ivory-towered critics who wouldn’t know a good yarn if they fell over one. It was in fact no such thing. Bryce Courtenay’s performance included analogising himself to Dickens and Tolstoy, as well as the absurd claim that he had drawn readers to Australian literary writing. But the point in it when I became impatient was when Courtenay accused his Australian critics (and by overwhelming implication Peter Pierce chief among them) of being ignorant of popular writing.

Now Peter Pierce may have his faults as a critic but a lack of knowledge of the popular genres is not one of them. In his time, he has alerted readers to the merits of such figures as Thomas Harris (of The Silence of the Lambs fame) and to Carl Hiassen, the wonderfully whimsical chronicler of Miami sleaze. He is an authority on Thomas Keneally, who has sometimes managed to span the two spheres of the popular and the literary, and he also knows precisely why he thinks Colleen McCullough – commercial writer though she is – is a better craftsman than Bryce Courtenay.

But that judgment was not an issue on the Festival day; what was at issue was the critic’s right to make any kind of judgement on the work of a millionaire self-promoter who proffers as a knockdown argument how many books he sells. As Raimond Gaita said from the audience (to the applause of one segment of it), an ability to sell books is not a negligible thing, but it has nothing to do with arguments about quality. And, pace Bryce Courtenay, some sense of literary quality, however displaced, is relevant to the discussion of any level of writing, however popular.

Although I don’t have any claims to Peter Pierce’s erudition in this area, every so often I will review a thriller by Elmore Leonard or James Lee Burke or Shane Maloney. I normally refer to such books explicitly as ‘trash’ by which I mean nothing more objectionable than that they are primarily entertainments and that they shouldn’t, unless they forcibly insinuate such ambitions, be confused with art. Sometimes – as with Thomas Harris’s two Hannibal Lecter novels – the two streams cross and we find ourselves in the vicinity of genre writing of such power that Hitchcock and Dostoyevsky seem not too far off. More often what we get from the best ‘trash’ – from Le Carré or from Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins novels – is a sense of semi-‘real’ characterisation, of a use of stereotypes that swerves away from complete obviousness, accurate-sounding dialogue and clean, sometimes elegant, prose, all in coexistence with the compulsions of a fast-moving formula plot that quickens the interest even as it relaxes the mind.

In other words, although genre writing does not overlap with ‘literature’ (if it does it’s literature which wins) it gets its deeper charms from partaking of literary qualities. We all understand this implicitly because we know there’s a bit more to Chandler and Chesterton and their successors, more style and more humanity, than there is to a mere hack, just as there’s more reality (more of what you might be tempted to call artistic realisation) in The Bill than in a lot of other cop shows.

Of course, it’s possible to naturalise these matters entirely and say that any kind of preference for a form of reading, light or heavy, is simply a matter of taste and this taste is determined by class, gender, education (the usual suspects), by the codes the reader brings with him and wants to see configured, not by any intrinsic quality. This is, in fact, an easier argument to make about ‘trash’ (where we choose our poisons) than it is about ‘art’ where we feel that we are compelled by the power or truth of a vision we do not like. As Lenin said of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, ‘repellent but great’.

It would be too easy to say of Bryce Courtenay that he is repellent but not. Yet there is something overweeningly vain about not only wanting the money and the glory (that may be human enough), but to make such a naked equation between success and achievement and put on such an act about it in the presence of people who spend their lives saying what they reckon about books.

Even a complete aesthetic relativist will sometimes want to say that a book can be so ‘badly’ written, so turgid in its exposition and cardboard in its characterisation, so naïve and reactionary in its politics, so lumbering as anything but the plot outline of a better movie, that it just ain’t worth the while of, say, a professional woman with feminist ideals and a busy life. Good and bad don’t come into it.

Of course I’m speaking hypothetically, not about Bryce Courtenay. I did try to suggest to Courtenay the other week that reviews are of no significance whatever to the sales of his books. The implication – which I did not draw out – is that the review market, that section of the largely broadsheet­-reading population (though it is only a fraction of that) who will turn to the book pages of a paper are people who are interested in literary fiction, quality non-fiction, upper level ‘trash’ and in reading about a range of books which they will never actually pick up. It seems to be Bryce Courtenay’s fate that he is reviewed in this country only as a national phenomenon. In other words, he is not very likely to pick up an extra two per cent – or whatever – of readers from the reviews he gets in the book pages. Perhaps, when it all gets down to it, that’s part of his anxiety. His books abound, of course, and every so often someone who writes literary fiction, or spends their life talking about it, will pick up one of his novels, overcoming all snobbery, in the hope of learning something about the grandeur of old-fashioned narratives. But, on the anecdotal evidence, the results are disappointing.

Bryce Courtenay’s primary significance to Australian publishing is that he sells extraordinarily well for his Australian publishers and that has a benign effect on their profit margins and – more ambiguously – on their ability to print and promote quality Australian work. It’s not my intention to make specific judgements about his work, but he seems to me a less compelling writer than that other success story, John Marsden, whose latest book is snapped up by every teenager in sight.

But that’s not the point. He just needs to understand that his work is going to be judged most expertly by people who are not just snobs but who understand why Miss Smilla or American Tabloid can suck them in just as much as the latest Rushdie or Winton.

When Vikram Seth had a runaway international success with A Suitable Boy, he admitted to me that, for all my comparisons with Tolstoy, the book might just be a soap. The thing Bryce Courtenay needs to remember is that there is trash and trash, soap and soap.