Portrait of the book reviewer as a prematurely aged hack

By MICHAEL CAINES

A thought for anybody planning on reviewing a book (or two – or why not three?) this weekend: among his other achievements, George Orwell is perhaps responsible for what must still be one of the best things ever written about the grind of being a regular book reviewer. "Confessions of a Book Reviewer" was first published in the Tribune for May 3, 1946; and while it is not exactly what the title promises, some of it is, I suspect, still eerily relevant to the world of the books pages . . .

Orwell himself, as noted at the foot of the Orwell Prize reproduction of "Confessions", reviewed around 700 books, plays and films over two decades, for the Observer, the Listener and even, on a few occasions, for the TLS. He peaked in 1940, "when he reviewed 135 books, plays and films in 67 reviews".

Six years later, he could refer in his short essay (highly recommended if you haven't read it before, not least as a taste of Orwell's still entertaining journalism) to the "regular reviewer" as "anyone who reviews, say, a minimum of a hundred books a year". Many editors relied then as they do now on a "team of hacks", despite the consequent devaluation of the critical language ("as soon as values are mentioned, standards collapse") and the disingenuous praise doled out by those who are doomed to having a "professional relationship" with dull books (i.e., the majority).

Alternative schemes, such as turning to a wider pool of experts and amateurs rather than the "bored professional", in Orwell's eyes, are impracticable: "that kind of thing is very difficult to organize". (At times, I'd be inclined to agree, but as it happens, barely anybody writes week in, week out for the TLS, which draws on academic experts, crack-shot amateurs and even the odd seasoned old pro.)

Orwell regards the "usual middle-length review of about 600 words" as "bound to be worthless", and 1,000 words as the "bare minimum", with "very long reviews" the ideal; I like a long essay, too, but the worth of a piece of less than 1,000 words seems to me to depend entirely on who's writing it and what it's about. How about this Guardian review of After Birth by Elisa Albert, for example, by my colleague Roz Dineen, or Janette Currie on The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins, both of which split the difference between Orwell's worthless 600 and "bare minimum" 1,000?

Orwell also recommended that literary papers just "ignore the great majority of books". It is tempting to take that suggestion as a sign of more innocent times – times when it seemed even vaguely possible, in the dented war years and their immediate aftermath, to cover anything like a majority of books published. There is, notoriously, little danger of that today. While many literary editors remain rightly keen to represent the diversity of what gets published, nobody can cover more than a probably much-better-than-average fraction of even just the new novels published each year. Publishers Weekly performs a useful service for the trade in covering so much ground, but obviously that has to take the form of the "Short notes" Orwell approved; learned journals that ask an (unpaid) scholar to round up, say, the year's work in Shakespeare studies are another story.

"Confessions" feels to me like a tribute to George Gissing, an updating and an aside to New Grub Street, in which reviews serve the blithely careerist Jasper Milvain as a means to achieve his ultimate strategic end, and Edward Reardon languishes in the hellish cell of his blocked, bill-beleaguered mind. Orwell's archetypal (male) reviewer occupies another sorry dwelling: a "cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea"; he has misplaced both his spectacles and a cheque for two guineas; he is thirty-five "but looks fifty". He has until the following midday to write 800 words on five volumes that do not, as the editor suggested, "go well together"; one of the books, A Short History of European Democracy, is 680 pages "and weighs four pounds".

To some reviewers, that will sound like the stuff of nightmares indistinguishable from the stuff of desperate days in front of the laptop (and there another small difference, the technological one, comes between Orwell's day and the present). Does it appear ridiculous to others? Indulgent and melodramatic? Accurate for its time but irrelevant now? I'd love to know.

Reproduced above and below are examples of an innovative approach to reviewing books from the self-taught comic artist Kevin Thomas, who published a series of comic strip reviews on The Rumpus from 2010 to 2014 (and which he has now brought together in book form, as Horn!: The collected reviews). Thomas describes it series as the "partial diary of a reading life", in which he tries to "get to the core of a book" and "luxuriate in its surface beauty" at the same time. It's lucky for him he quit before A Short History of European Democracy hit his desk.