A Reviewerfesto of my own... the drums! the drums!

Yesterday I posted about the rumblings in the genre review jungle and how Gabe Chouinard had stirred up something of a hornet's nest by writing a review partly devoted to how awful the standard of online reviews is.  Well since then, my post was blogged by Gabe and suddenly half of livejournal is visiting me (they talk about the Slashdot and the Digg effect but appear once on an influential blog - particularly one hosted by a service with built-in networking - and suddenly you realise how few people actually read your blog to start with *sigh*). 

Anyway, I noticed that another response to Gabe's post was that of Rob Bedford who was one of the targets for Gabe's venomous tongue.  Clearly poor Rob is in a state of shock over suddenly becoming a paragon of poor reviewing and he defends himself quite touchingly by forlornly pointing to his BA in English and the fact that he wasn't completely happy with the review in the first place.  So, driven ever onwards by a community spirit imbued with a tendency towards  navel-gazing and self-justification, I have decided to write a few words about where I come from as a reviewer.   

A Portrait of the Reviewer as a Young Man... 

My main influence in reviewing style is not Gary K. Wolfe from Locus or Mark Kermode from BBC Radio 5 or even the fantastically foul-mouthed Charlie Brooker from the Guardian.  All of these writers have had their influence but mostly after I began writing.  In fact, the guy who inspired me to write my first review was Dan Davenport who reviews RPGs over at the overly moderated sinkhole known as RPGnet.  Davenport's reviews were always incredibly clear, incredibly insightful and incredibly fun to read which, when reviewing material as dry as RPG rules, is incredibly useful.  Davenport is an excellent reviewer because his works invariably satisfy and balance the three rules of good reviewing:

• Clarity - A review must always be written in such a way as to be accessible to anyone who should happen to read it.  There's a time and a place for academic language and references and by and large it's not in a popular review so prose needs to be transparent and points need to be spelled out.
• Depth - On one end of the spectrum there is the "capsule review" which is frequently nothing more than a plot summary and at the other end there is the critical article in which a text's various subtleties are carefully and painstakingly drawn out.  In a popular review, you need to be closer to the latter than the former but a review should be like a guidebook to a town... you can point out some of the interesting sights but ultimately you have to let the reader makes his or her own discoveries.
• Integrity - A good review is one that does justice both to the strengths and weaknesses of the text and to the opinions of the reviewer.  A good reviewer should never silence his inner voice for the sake of free stuff and give a glowing review where none is deserved but similarly a reviewer should not produce a stream of subjective impressions.  There are rules to genres, books exist in a context, there is such a thing as good and bad writing and some books just are better than others and regardless of your personal reaction to a book, your review should reflect these facts.

I personally liken the job of a genre reviewer to that of the owner of a good independent music shop.  Your job is to know what's going on in a genre and to bear in mind the different tastes of different customers so that when they come in looking for something new to buy, you can always be in a position to recommend or warn them away from a book or film because you know what it's about and you know whether or not it is worthy of their time.  your job isn't to be a fanboy pimp for your favourite authors or some camp theatre critic drunk on his own power and his ability to deliver viciously cutting put downs to other people's work (in fact, writing a negative review is incredibly tricky as the tendency is always to write about how much YOU hated the piece rather than why it fails).  Your job is to draw people's attention to good stuff and warn them away from the bad stuff.

Anyone who has been close to a healthy local rock scene will know the power and the importance of a well run record shop manned by clerks with good taste and lots of knowledge.  I see the role and duty of the genre critic to be the same... only we don't make fun of the guys who come into the store wearing suits.

Comments

[Niall Harrison]

A review must always be written in such a way as to be accessible to anyone who should happen to read it.

Not a Clute fan, then? :) /pred

Interesting post. I'm tempted to write up my own reviewer history, but I think I'll have to save it until I've posted about an actual book of some kind. Even I have a limit for how many meta comments I can make in one week ...

[Jonathan McCalmont]

> Not a Clute fan, then? :) /pred

Hehehe... this is where I should paraphrase Wittgenstein by waving my hand and saying that I don't prostitute my intelligence by reading the work of other reviewers but in truth I find his prose rather fun... it reminds me of the way people speak in Deadwood. I like to think of him writing his reviews in a smoking jacket.

Ah yes, meta-comments. First the meta-comments, then the pictures of cats and before you know it you're putting up poetry. It's a slippery slope mate :-)