Book reviewers review books. But who reviews the reviewers? That's the question Chris Bowers, author of Nick Clegg: The Biography, is asking...
It’s a question I’ve asked myself, both as a reader and an author, especially after a recent ‘review’ in the Times Literary Supplement by of two books: my biography of Nick Clegg, and Jasper Gerard’s book about the formation of the coalition government.
I put ‘review’ in inverted commas because I want to stay on the right side of the trade descriptions Act. Williams’s review was nothing of the sort. It was his own personal treatise on liberalism with one paragraph (around 15 per cent of the total article) devoted to the two books.
Don’t get me wrong – he’s quite entitled to write a treatise about liberalism (and it was quite interesting as far as it went). If he was writing that sort of article, he could easily have referred in passing to one or several books to illustrate a point. But his piece appeared in the book review section of the TLS, with the two books he was supposed to be reviewing highlighted in large type below the headline.
As one of the two affected authors, I’m obviously not neutral here, but if I’d been a reader I’d have been severely disappointed. What does he tell me about the two books? Next to nothing. If I’d bought the TLS hoping to find out whether either book is worth buying, I wouldn’t be any the wiser after reading Williams’s treatise.
Good writing comes when there is a relative absence of restrictions, so I don’t wish to suggest there should be a formula for book reviews. Reviewers often start on a parallel track to create some context for the book they’re reviewing, which is fine, but the job is still to tell the reader a reasonable amount about the book. To me, a good reviewer should always answer the reader’s question, ‘Is this book for me or not?’
I had something similar with Andrew Adonis’s review of my book in the New Statesman. It wasn’t that he liked or disliked it. What bothered me was that he used his 'review' as a vehicle to reiterate his belief that Clegg could have gone into coalition with Labour after the 2010 election. So desperate was he to ram home his point that he quoted Clegg’s position on Europe blatantly out of context, something that does nothing for understanding whether the book is worth reading.
There isn’t a lot a book can say on its cover, so the reviewer has an important role in explaining what’s in the tin. Any reviewers who stray too far from that are not doing what it says on their own tin, nor doing their readers any favours.