A Christmas brickbat
Paul Ableman
Reviewing is not a science. Five critics can honestly produce five different estimates of the same book. They may all be wrong or, more probably, all partly right. Nabokov thought Dr Zhivago was tedious rubbish while Edmund Wilson thought it was a masterpiece. I personally adhere to Nabokov's opinion but recall that I was ultimately induced to read the book by Wilson's penetrating and passionate review of it. I now think that Wilson, like the majority of those who hailed the appearance of the stodgy work, was unconsciously mistaking political for literary significance. Ultimately, of course, there is no right or wrong but only consensus which changes with perspective. The only thing that can be legitimately required of a critic is that he form an honest opinion based on a searching examination of the work. When a book, possibly for some extraneous reason, such as the 'cold-war' implications of Dr Zhivago, acquires a dimension of public interest in excess of its actual stature, it is perhaps even more important that critics produce an honest appraisal. One reason for a book to acquire such augmented significance is for it to win, or win for its author, a major literary prize. The most important literary prize for fiction in. England is the Booker Prize and the winner this year was Penelope Fitzgerald for her novel Offshore (Collins L4.50). -Bernard Levin belatedly noticed, and Immoderately lauded, this work earlier this month in the Sunday Times. His panegyric condluded: 'Offshore is a marvellous achievement; strong, supple, human, ripe, generous and graceful. The award of the Booker Prize to Miss Fitzgerald for it has occasioned surprise and that is the only surprising thing about her victory.' I was, in fact, one of those who, both Privately and publicly, expressed surprise at the award although I have no way of knowing if Mr Levin was aware of the fact. Probably not since the public avowal was made in the course of a broadcast for the Australian Broadcasting Commission. This included the following passage:• 'Penelope Fitzgerald „ . is, according to the Book League's hand-out, an Oxford graduate and she has acquired her broadspectrum credentials by working in journalism, the BBC, an all-night coffee-stall and a bookshop. It was the bookshop facet of her life which impinged on mine last year when my literary editor on the Spectator handed me for review her first slender novel, which had unaccountably turned up on the Booker short list and was entitled — surprise, surprise — The Bookshop. It proved, as I then wrote, to be an engaging but Slight work. Rich in foible, I amplified, The Book shop is an amateur book. And this year? Penelope Fitzgerald's family, according to the handout, used to live on a Thames barge. So what is her new book about? Surprise, surprise life on a Thames barge. Now Offshore, the new work, is undoubtedly more secure in its handling of character and story than The Bookshop was but remains a vanishingly slight work uncontaminated by any important issue, arresting character or dramatic situation.
What can have happened to English fiction? Perhaps that's it out there, in midstream, about to go down for the third time. Possibly one of the Fitzgerald clan might dive off the barge and rescue it. But no, I'm forgetting, They are now settled, the handout informs us, in London and Cambridge. Will Penelope Fitzgerald be short-listed again next year with her latest prose masterpiece 'Living in London and Cambridge'? Who can tell. But I feel very depressed. Can the prose of Richardson, Dickens and D. H. Lawrence really have shrunk to the clipped, wry syntax of Offshore? The alternative, and probable, explanation is that there is something desperately wrong with the whole Booker Prize operation. It would take too long to examine it in detail but one key fact stands out. Last year's chairman of the judges was Sir Alfred Ayer and this year's was Lord Briggs, respectively a philosopher and an historian. But why a philosopher and an historian? Why not a novelist? When the Royal Academy is selecting pictures for its summer exhibition it does not send for a lawyer or a politician to judge the submitted works. When a faculty of medicine is deciding whether to grant someone a degree in surgery it doesn't import a farmer to watch him operate. Surely only excellent practitioners can assess the degree of excellence achieved?
And yet English fiction, at the very least as important as any other branch of English life, is relegated to the care of any available amateur, only providing that he's eminent, preferably titled and known to read a novel now and then. 04 books were submitted by the publishers this year and I have no doubt they were all honestly scrutinised. What I have the strongest possible doubt about is whether they were assessed for literary strength by judges qualified to discern it rather than sifted for some inoffensive work that would disarm criticism with charm, which is to art what sugar is to gastronomy. I do not reproach Penelope Fitzgerald. It's not her fault that her ,graceful wisp of a book has been thrust into an anomalous prominence where it can hardly avoid comparison with real literature. That is clearly a view almost diametrically opposed to the one proclaimed, and I use the term deliberately, by Mr Levin. I have already said that honest differences of opinion are healthy and inevitable but the contendon I hope to substantiate is that Mr Levin's effusion about Miss Fitzgerald's book was not a review at all but a puff. I think it can even be shown that his exorbitant tribute, designed to sustain the proposition that Penelope Fitzgerald has produced a 'marvellous achievement' itself contains the dismal evidence that she hasn't.
In the first place, the passages he quotes from her book are thick with cliches. The following is a brief selection: 'he would never get anywhere the kind of man . if truth were known . . , had come to doubt the value . . . put his trust in . . . perpetual process of. . . sure instinct for authority . . . 'These, and many more, can be extracted from the four brief passages Levin retails. In fairness it should be said the Miss Fitzgerald does not write exclusively in clichés. There are a few passages of excellent prose, better than anything Levin passes on, in her book but, generally speaking, the cliché rules. Next let us look at the imagery. Mr Levin considers the following, about a man drinking gin, to be worth quoting: he 'sucked in his drink as though his glass was a blowhole in Arctic ice and to drink was his only hope of survival .' Now whichever way you turn it, this simply doesn't work. A man under the ice would be sucking in air, not liquid. A man above the ice would hardly be sucking in salt water to survive. A glass is not a hole but a cylinder —you can't suck through it. Instead of concentrating impact, the muddled image disperses it.
Can it be that Mr Levin simply failed to notice these, and other more grievous shortcomings, in Offshore? It would be like a man in a Savile Row suit failing to notice that another man was wearing rags. Mr Levin's own prose is fastidious, His images ('poverty waiting like a shark' from the review under discussion) are terse and telling and when he uses a cliché it is consciously and for a legitimate purpose. He is not, as poor Miss Fitzgerald repeatedly is, at the mercy of the things. Why then has Mr Levin been less than candid in his appraisal? ` Well, I don't suppose he was bribed or even that Penelope Fitzgerald is his auntie (although a lot of reviewers find it hard to maintain critical standards when reviewing a friend's book) but his melancholy puff is undoubtedly an example of pundit's megalomania. For whatever reason, the 'surprise' which greeted the award of the Booker Prize to Penelope Fitzgerald, a surprise which any reviewer with the prestige and well-being of English fiction at heart could hardly fail to understand, displeased him and he decided to brush away the sceptics with a sweep of his mighty pen. But even publicists as potent as Bernard Levin cannot create reality and it is unwholesome for them, and may be desperate for vital matters like the future of the English novel, if they start thinking they can.
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