Susan Gerstein's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-rating-system"

How does one rate a book nowadays? How do you compare the great classics to currently published books, many receiving the maximum five stars from the reading public? How to compare Shakespeare to Arthur Miller? Mozart to Gershwin? Does each rate “five stars” or does true genius fall outside the rating system? Does the system based on five stars adequately express degrees of greatness? Or, for that matter, does awarding five stars to Arthur Miller differentiate him sufficiently from, say, Lanford Wilson with three?

I’ve been wondering about this for some time, looking at ratings of both current and classic books. I am talking of reader ratings; the professional reviewers have space and scope enough to explicate their opinion and the very good ones will consider the book under their scrutiny and put it into its proper place in the universe. But in this brave new world where everyone is a critic and has an opportunity, nay, even a “duty” to express an opinion, the distinctions between the great, the good and the indifferent have eroded irreparably.

What brought this to an even sharper focus for me recently was reading Mary Renault’s two books on the Theseus legend, “The King Must Die” and “The Bull From The Sea”. I read them many years ago; they are wonderful books, they stand the test of time and live up to a very high ambition. They transform a legend not only into a lived-in world described in minute detail, but make the phantasmagorical ancient Greek legends come alive in very human terms, the motivations and passions of the era vividly real. The bull ring in Knossos, the abandonment of Ariadne on Naxos, the love of Theseus for the Amazon queen Hyppolita, the irrational passion of Phaedra for her stepson and the tragic consequences that follow are all there, wrenchingly real and yet larger than life. One can well imagine how the legends were born.

And yet. If I award five stars to these books, as I must when I compare them to many others that either lack their ambition or have overweening ambition utterly unfulfilled, then how do I rate Thomas Mann’s “Joseph and His Brothers”? There are hardly enough stars in the firmament to express the greatness of the latter. These four volumes are so far above everything that has ever been attempted in this genre – that of fictionally recreating a legendary-historical world – that awarding them five stars would strike me as ridiculously inadequate. Reading them you are not simply reading a good book; you are enveloped in a parallel world, working for seven hard years with Jacob to obtain Rachel; and then seven again after the trick played on him and receiving Leah instead; the birth of Joseph, the beloved one of all Jacob’s children and the heartrending loss of him; Joseph’s travails in Egypt, in a world described as all too recognizable to us; his role in the household of Potiphar, the tragic passion of Potiphar’s wife that sends Joseph first to the lower depths only to emerge to the heights of power at the right hand of the Pharaoh. You live with them and await excitedly the next development; for the most amazing fact about the Joseph books is that for all its philosophical concepts – the nature of time, the hubris of parental exceptionalism, the destructiveness of irrational passion, the role of chance in human life – it is a page-turner: one can’t wait to find out what happens next, right up to the final chapters that bring the preceding thousands of pages to a deeply satisfying conclusion.

So. What does Mary Renault get? What do Robert Graves’ “I, Claudius”, “Claudius the God” and “Hercules, My Shipmate” get? Indubitably, five stars, if I were to rate them on the various websites. These are wonderful writers, memorable books. But there must be a category above the ordinary where such ratings don’t count, lose all their meaning for one is dealing with universal genius.