Did George Orwell have a point about book reviewing?

Orwell's famous remarks about low-end literary criticism have only grown more prescient as time has gone by

I read George Orwell’s excellent essay ‘Confessions of a Book Reviewer’ more often than I should, partly because it’s out of copyright and thus freely available online, and partly because it has one of the great beginnings of any piece. “In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing-grown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter among the piles of dusty papers that surround it. He cannot throw the papers away because the wastepaper basket is already overflowing, and besides, somewhere among the unanswered letters and unpaid bills it is possible that there is a cheque for two guineas which he is nearly certain he forgot to pay into the bank.”

This is Withnail territory, and the piece only gets funnier from there. (Read it here if you’re not already familiar.) But what Orwell isn’t concerned with is the idea that the reviewer is offering any kind of service to the literary industry. The poor drudge (“He is a man of 35, but looks 50. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost”) accepts book criticism work not because he has a genuinely worthwhile opinion, but because low-rent newspapers and magazines need to fill their pages, and this is a cheap way of doing so. Therefore this unfortunate soul is sent a range of titles by his editor that includes “Palestine at the Cross Roads, Scientific Dairy Farming, A Short History of European Democracy (this one 680 pages and weighs four pounds), Tribal Customs in Portuguese East Africa, and a novel, It’s Nicer Lying Down.”

Just under eight decades after Orwell published his essay, there are some things that he writes about that have changed (for better or worse), and others that remain defiantly the same. He laments that “Since the war publishers have been less able than before to twist the tails of literary editors and evoke a paean of praise for every book that they produce, but on the other hand the standard of reviewing has gone down owing to lack of space and other inconveniences.”

This is, unfortunately, as true today as it was back then. When I read Will Lloyd’s genuinely jaw-dropping evisceration of Sarah Vine’s memoir in the New Statesman - a piece that lit up discussion on my WhatsApp for days afterwards - it was in large part because Lloyd’s damning criticism of a book that he called “[a] dense fog of self-pity and thwarted ambition” went so far beyond what is generally considered acceptable that it stood out amongst other notices, both of Vine’s autobiography and what else comes out these days.

Orwell is right about the non-specialist nature of book critics - “Needless to say this person is a writer. He might be a poet, a novelist, or a writer of film scripts or radio features, for all literary people are very much alike, but let us say that he is a book reviewer” - and in my capacity as books editor of The Spectator World, I commission everyone from household name novelists to recent university graduates. The only unifying criteria is that people can write well, and entertainingly, about the book at hand. A significant change since Orwell’s day is that we are no longer obliged to commission reviews of books like Scientific Dairy Farming. Today, with nearly 4000 books published a week in the UK (mainly, admittedly, from technical and academic presses), there would not be space to cover such a title, unless of course the title was Scientific Dairy Farming Monthly, in which case this would be catnip to our loyal and committed readership.

As a reviewer myself, I write criticism about more than 50 books a year, rather less than the “hundred or so a year” that Orwell’s hack critic has to cover. I review three a month as briefs for The Observer, and have numerous other titles that I cover new publications in. My general criteria is only to review something that I’m interested in, and ideally suited to writing about, although there will also be occasions that I am asked by an editor to write about a specific title. Sometimes, they’ll be good, and at other times, they’ll be awful. Very few are truly memorable, or essential.

Personally I’m inclined to agree with Ann Kennedy Smith, who wrote on her Substack that “you are not doing the reader a service if you are too bland and polite; it’s better to get to the point straightaway, and have a voice of your own”. She also said “I really don’t enjoy it when reviewers are dismissive or insulting, or try to be too clever by half (Auberon Waugh, I’m looking at you). I’d rather be generous, think about what the author is trying to do, and whether or not the book succeeds on those terms.” Swap Waugh Jr for some of the more waspish critics writing today, and nothing much has changed there.

But Orwell was writing at a time when most, if not all, books were expected to be reviewed, as a public service. Today, the highly selective world of book reviewing is closer to advertising, given the reluctance of many critics to go fully ‘studs in’. Which is why a review such as Lloyd’s stands out. Even so, however, he is criticising a household name figure and Daily Mail columnist who dishes it out on a weekly basis, and therefore must be expected to take it. There is something bullying and unwholesome about attacking a first-time writer in print, a sense of attempting to exclude a potential entrant from a club. A poor notice in a major newspaper or magazine can still have the effect of halting a career in its tracks before it has begun, which is salutary in its impact.

Orwell wrote that “The rest of his work, however conscientious he may be in praising or damning, is in essence humbug. He is pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time.” Do we reviewers really pour our immortal spirits down the drain, a half pint at a time? How dispiriting if so. My fellow writers Philip Womack and Mathew Lyons have both written exceptionally well on the demands faced by, respectively, fiction and non-fiction reviewers, and both of them acknowledge that book reviewing is often difficult, especially because it is a dance between being accurate about a book, keeping an (often capricious) literary editor happy and potentially making an enemy for life if you pan an influential figure’s book too viciously. I doubt Lloyd will be receiving many Christmas cards from either Vine or her ex-husband, Spectator editor Michael Gove.

Orwell concludes that “the week-in, week-out production of snippets soon reduces him to the crushed figure in a dressing grown whom I described at the beginning of this article”. This is, alas, potentially true. Yet I would still argue that, for all its faults and sins, writing about books beats many other jobs as a means of making a living. You may be pottering around in a dressing gown until midday, flicking through a publisher’s proof and making notes on the margin, but is that really such a terrible way to earn a livelihood? Many would argue not. And that is why the whole industry, which really should never have survived such a damning critique as Orwell’s, lurches on to this day: flawed, incorrigible yet utterly vital for everyone involved in it in this most curious and bookish of mini-ecosystems.