Review of reviewers

PERSONAL COLUMN JOHN BRAINE

The reviews of my latest novel, The Crying Game, having now all come in, this is the time when I lick the wounds or cherish the caresses. It's been my practice with previous novels to keep the good reviews and throw the bad ones away—there's no point in distressing oneself.

But isn't there such a thing as constructive criticism? No, there isn't. Except in a handful of cases, one learns nothing from reviews. One's either encouraged or discouraged and the dis- couraging ones must instantly be -expunged from the memory. In any case, as Henry Puffmore in his entertaining column 'Under Review' in The Bookseller points out, the reviews wildly contradict each other.

To select from Mr Puffmore, the Bath Even- ing Chronicle likened the sensation of reading my book to 'that which one might expect to get from wallowing in dung,' to which the Surrey Comet replied that it was 'one of the most pleasant, readable books I have had for months . . .' After a striking early success, noted the Yorkshire Post, Mr Braine had developed, and produced a work which was 'vastly different.' To which the New Statesman retorted that 'his progress as a writer has been curiously static.' The Sunday Telegraph noticed its !slow and fumbling start,' while the Daily Telegraph commented that it 'begins with all the vigour and attack of Room at the Top.'

If I were honestly looking for guidance from this little lot, I should explode like the chameleon on the tartan. But this particular phenomenon has been familiar to me since Room at the Top which, one reputable re- viewer stated, had the sole virtue of being soundly constructed but which, another equally reputable reviewer stated, had sloppy construc- tion as its only flaw. All that it signifies is that reviewers' ideas differ. It couldn't, of course, possibly mean that any of them are pig-ignorant. Nor could it mean that any are so dishonest as to write something they know to be untrue simply to diversify the tone of their review and to prove that they're in there on the job.

What I do object to—and not only on my own behalf—is two increasingly common re- viewers' attitudes. The first is that the quality of readability is rather vulgar, never coexisting with literary merit, an irresistibly charming smile on an ugly face, a fairy's gift awarded the most undeserving. The second is that a novelist's characters are to be judged on moral grounds. The novel is good or bad according to the degree with which his characters con- form to the reviewers' moral standards. These, nine times out of ten, will be progressive liberal humanist—in short, left wing.

The first attitude is, as Mr J. B. Priestley has pointed out, essentially post-1914. Novels are rigidly divided into two categories—best- selling—'boxes for collecting royalties,' to quote Mr Gavin Ewart in the Evening Standard— and serious. Serious novels illumine some new aspect of the human heart, condition or pre- dicament, best-sellers merely pass the time.

The Observer rather neatly illustrates this: 'John Braine has enough command of some

proven fictional formulas and enough narra- tive pace to make The Crying Game easy to read in the way that some mediocre but glossy television plays are easy to watch, but it's hardly possible on this evidence to take his work with the seriousness with which it's sometimes greeted.' But -this at least is civilised in tone. It's in some of the provincial papers —the Lancashire Evening Telegraph, for in- stance—that one becomes aware of an under- current of genuine dislike. 'John Braine must be getting worried. After the phenomenal [meaning 'extraordinary] success of Room at the Top there has been little to commend him to the reading public . . . So his fourth book is a deliberate attempt to write a best seller . .

It's my fifth book actually; the inaccuracy is surprising, coming from someone who so confidently claims to know my state of mind and my inmost motives. The picture of myself as the champion trying to make a comeback has a certain dramatic appeal, but it couldn't be farther from the truth. I've made a living from my novels for eleven years now because a sizeable minority of the reading public knows that I never fall below a certain standard.

As I grow older my problem is that I have more to write about and less time in which to write. I neither need nor desire a full social life. I sit on only one committee, I very seldom speak in public. There isn't, when I come to think of it, very much left to give up. And even if I gave up everything, like Rilke, there still wouldn't be enough time. The worn old tag puts it with a terrible accuracy : vita brevis, ars longa. There certainly isn't even a minute to spare in worrying about my sales.

I don't, however, really complain about being termed readable. Looking through the reviews I see that nine out of every ten call me so. 'Almost compulsively readable . . . A good read . . . highly entertaining . .

Even SBF of the Bath and Wilts Evening Chronicle, who likens reading my novel to wallowing in dung, admits that 'the reader, stagger as he night, does not give in and lay down the book. He is obliged, by the author's sheer narrative force, to stick with this por- trayal of life . . . until the final bell has sounded.' One could hardly wish-for a greater compliment : the point is that it isn't meant as one.

Only a few reviewers—notably Francis King, himself a professional novelist—realise that criticism of the novel begins with this con- sideration, that if a novel fails to be readable it fails in every other respect. And readability is the product of hard work, of conscious planning. It isn't enough to build up a complex plot; otherwise (God forgive me for being so uncharitable) Miss Iris Murdoch or any other clever and imaginative person could be a novelist. Pace must be varied, descriptions of people and places must be more than cata- logues, there mustn't be only a surprise at the end of each chapter but one at the end of each sentence—but Henry James has said it all in two words. Dramatise, dramatise: if you understand that, you understand every- thing about the technique of the novel.

But to dismiss a novelist as merely a best- seller, merely readable, betrays a fundamental lack of perception—the reviewer hasn't the intellectual equipment to determine what exactly makes the novel readable. More often than not, alas, he's too lazy to do the job of technical analysis and is content with a snap judgment coupled with as bright and lively a summary of the story as he can manage But incompetence and idleness are forgi‘e- able. I don't feel this kind of reviewer to be my enemy, to be actively malignant What frightens me is the politically motivated review. The Times Literary Supplement provides the most revealing example of this genre. For essentially it isn't literary criticism—except that rather strangely it describes the book as 'very readable' right at the beginning—but an attack upon the morals of my characters, particularly the hero's. It's a most readable review-1 may as well return the compliment—because the moral indignation behind it, based on false premisses though it is, is absolutely white-hot. (I expect that the reviews of the late James Douglas, he who would rather have given his daughter a vial of prussic acid than a copy of The Well of Loneliness, had the same impas- sioned quality.) The tone of the review is one of extreme shock. How dare I have my hero and his friends invent the Society for the Propagation of Reac- tion, Arrogance and Stubborn Prejudice (Executive, Franco, Salazar, Vorster and Ian Smith; Chaplain, Cardinal Ottaviani)? How dare I have my hero find a council estate ugly and depressing? How dare he, interviewing the parents of a murdered child, both be repelled by them physically and moved to tears at the death of the child? How dare his friend have a tray containing the visiting cards of dukes and a collection of children's books and handcuffs?

The answer is that this is what -human beings are like. High-spirited young men who reject the cant of the left habitually make fun of all its values. They can't help feeling that there must be something good about anyone of whom the left disapproves. And vice versa; I've even met people who call Che Guevara the Horst Wessel of the left. It takes all sorts to make a world—and that really is what novels are about.

Criticism begins with the characters' credi- bility as characters, always remembering that, whilst at a rough estimate 90 per cent of characters in contemporary novels are left wing, the proportion in real life is more likely 90 per cent the other way. For in this country, thank God, people vote for the party which they hope will give them the most material benefits. Whatever the government, the people of Britain remain staunchly right wing, and any novel which doesn't take this fact into account is wilfully distorting reality.

I began this article reluctantly as a kind of experiment. I end with reluctance: I should have enjoyed quoting from the good reviews, the reviews which showed some inkling of knowing what the book was about and what I was trying to do. Frankly, it's always a great pleasure to read about one's own work. But I don't think I shall ever repeat the ex- periment. For I remember now what Heming- way said about American writers : 'If they believe the critics when they say they are great they must believe them when they say they are rotten and they lose confidence .' That confidence is what all writers live by. It isn't the same as conceit, though there's a healthy admixture of conceit in it. It's no more to be questioned than virility is. Whoever says he doesn't read his reviews is a liar: whoever reads them more than once is a suicidal fool.