Reviewing

Writing reviews: How much detail is too much?

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Many years ago, I wrote a post on litblog reviews, specifically on what blog readers look for in reviews by other bloggers. That post looked at overall content, and has provided me with a general guide ever since.

Today, however, I have a slightly different question. It relates to detail – and was inspired by my recent post on Paddy O’Reilly’s Other houses. The details in question related to relationships and place, but in a way they serve as examples for the bigger question. I’ll explain … taking relationships first.

The novel’s central family comprises Lily, Janks and teenager Jewelee. In my post, I described their situation as follows, “Her protagonists, Lily and Janks, are “battlers“, working class people who struggle payday to payday, but they want more for their now 15-year-old daughter, Jewelee …” What I didn’t spell out is that Lily had been a single mother to Jewelee for some years, that Janks had been a junkie whom Lily hadn’t dated until he got clean, and that, several years before the novel opens, Janks had moved in with Lily and Jewelee. He had proved to be a good, in fact, devoted, father to Jewelee so when the novel opens they are an established family and he is, by any account, Jewelee’s father. And that seemed to be the important point to know – at least, in terms of what I wanted to say about this novel. However, in the posts/reviews/summaries of the novel that I have seen around the web, this issue has been handled in a variety of ways. Some have gone my way, while others explain the characters’ backgrounds with different levels of detail.

The other decision I made concerns place. In an early version of my review, I wrote something like ‘…they move from their working class suburb along Melbourne’s Western Ring Road to one they “could barely afford”, Northcote, and enrol Jewelee in “a good school”.’ The final version simply read, ‘…they move from their working class suburb to one they “could barely afford”, and enrol Jewelee in “a good school”.’ The point is that for people who know Melbourne, naming the places/suburbs would add meaning, and thus value-add to the post. But, for everyone else, those place names mean very little. In the end, I decided that the majority of my blog readers probably don’t “know” Melbourne and that all the review really needed was to explain what sort of place they’d moved from and to.

So, what do you think? How do you decide which descriptive details to leave in when you write your posts and which ones can be comfortably omitted? Do you worry about misleading readers if you leave some types of detail out? To what degree does your known/expected audience affect your decision about what to include or omit? I’d love to hear your thoughts, so now, over to you …

Monday musings on Australian literature: Nonfiction awards 2024

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It’s been a very busy weekend, and I have a few posts waiting to do, plus a reading group book to finish for tomorrow, so this post is a quick one. Phew, you are probably saying if you stuck with me over the weekend!

Today’s topic recognises that our litblogosphere’s annual Nonfiction November event, currently coordinated by Liz Dexter, starts today. I don’t usually write a Monday Musings for this event, but I thought it might be interesting to look at what Australian works of nonfiction won awards this year. Most of the awards are specific nonfiction awards, but some are more general awards which can be won by fiction or nonfiction (like the Stella, albeit was won by fiction this year.)

I’ll list the awards alphabetically by title of award:

  • ABIA Biography Book of the Year: Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life (biography) (my review)
  • ABIA General Non-Fiction Book of the Year: Thomas Mayo and Kerry O’Brien, The Voice to Parliament handbook (handbook)
  • ACT Literary Awards, Nonfiction: Kate Fullagar, Bennelong & Phillip: A history unravelled (history)
  • Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize, Nonfiction Winner: Sonya Voumard, Tremor (I’ll be reporting more on this prize and the Fiction winner next weekend) (memoir/essay)
  • Indie Awards Book of the Year Non-fiction: David Marr, Killing for country: A family story (history)(Jonathan’s post)
  • Magarey Medal for Biography: Ann-Marie Priest, My tongue is my own: A life of Gwen Harwood (biography)
  • Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award: to be announced on 27 November, but 5 of the 6 shortlisted titles are nonfiction
  • National Biography Award: Lamisse Hamouda, The shape of dust (memoir)
  • NSW Premier’s History Prize, Australian History: Alecia Simmonds, Courting: An intimate history of love and the law (history)
  • NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction: Christine Kenneally, Ghosts of the orphanage (history) (Janine’s review)
  • Northern Territory Literary Awards, Charles Darwin University Creative Non-Fiction Award: Dave Clark, Remember (creative nonfiction about truthtelling)
  • Prime Minister’s Literary Award, Australian History: Ryan Cropp, Donald Horne: A life in the lucky country (biography) (Lisa’s review)
  • Queensland Literary Awards, The University of Queensland Non-Fiction Book Award: Abbas El-Zein, Bullet, paper, rock: A memoir of words and wars (memoir)
  • Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Prize for Non-fiction: Ellen van Neerven, Personal score: Sport, culture, identity (memoir and polemic)

So 14 awards here, and life writing (biography and memoir) is by far the most represented “genre”, partly because some of the awards are specifically for biography (life writing). History is second, and again, this is partly because there are specific history prizes (some of which are won by biography!) It is noteworthy, however, that other genres – nature writing and eco-nonfiction, for example – rarely get a look-in in these sorts of awards. And yet, there is some excellent writing in these genres being published (by Upswell, for example).

And a little survey…

Do you write nonfiction or non-fiction? In my admittedly minimal research, I have read that Americans are more likely to drop the hyphen, and this seems to play out in American versus English dictionaries.

I note that:

  • Liz has nonfiction in her banner, which is how I first titled this post
  • the above Australian awards vary in their usage – some using the hyphen and some not, but the hyphenated form seems to be winning.

I am tending to go with not, just as during my lifetime (or is it life-time!!) we’ve dropped the hyphen from tomorrow and today. (Hmm, a little research into these revealed that Chaucer for example had “tomorrow” – in his form “tomorwe” – unhyphenated. It was then later hyphenated and later again, re-unhyphenated – and I think I really need the hyphen there! Actually, it’s not as simple as this because through much of time the two forms have coexisted!)

What do you do?

Monday musings on Australian literature: Fearless reviewing in 1970

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I concluded last week’s Monday Musings by saying that I wasn’t finished with 1970. There are several posts I’m hoping to write, drawing from my 1970 research, but I’m starting with this one simply because it picks up on a comment I made last week.

That comment referenced George Johnston, and a review by John Lleonart of Barry Oakley’s A salute to the Great McCarthy in The Canberra Times (8 August). I wrote that Lleonart had some “niggles” about the book but concluded that Oakley had “given us in McCarthy a classic figure of Australian mores to rank with George Johnston’s My brother Jack“. I didn’t, however, share those niggles. He wasn’t the only one with “niggles” about the book he was reviewing, so I thought to write a post sharing some of the criticisms reviewers expressed, because they are enlightening about what was and wasn’t liked in writing and about the art of reviewing itself.

Lleonart starts his review by saying that “it’s a pity Barry Oakley shaped up for his new novel in the cultural cringe position”, and goes on to say that

Oakley could have scored both for Australian literature and the game had he followed the elementary rule that there are no beg pardons.

Instead of striding, chest out and blast you Jack after the ball, he tends to prop, apparently listening for the footsteps of intellectual hatchetmen.

But, these are not his main “niggles” (as he calls them). They include that, while “Oakley has a lot of natural ability with words … sometimes he carelessly drops into cliches”; that some of the characters are “cardboard”; and that the novel’s “social attitudes” look back to those of Lawson. Lleonart concludes, however, on the positives, which include not only the aforementioned reference to Johnston’s novel, but that our footballer protagonist McCarthy “finds in fiercely competitive sport a means of expression and, in its best moments, even a sense of the inner poetry of life.”

Suzanne Edgar, whose poetry collection The love procession I’ve reviewed here, wrote about two recent novels in The Canberra Times (March 7). She suggested that they had “appeared in answer to Thomas Keneally’s demand for acceptable middle-brow Australian fiction”. But,

The trouble is that only people who are serious about reading are likely to pay $3 and more for a hard cover book. If you pay that you are not usually after the sort of light-weight escapist stuff that can be had for 80c from any newsagent’s shelves.

Unfortunately, Jill Neville’s The love germ and Keith Leopold’s My brow is wet are just “simple, uncomplicated bed-time stories”. Neville, Edgar continues, writes “like a slick and practised copy writer slinging words and fashionable ideas around with studied, gay abandon and not too much discretion; ‘desorified’ is one of her more flippant coinings”.

Leopold’s book, on the other hand, is “your academic’s pipe dream, the clever, but of course tongue-in-cheek crime story relieved by satiric treatment of Australian ivory towers. The sort of thing they would all like to write if they were not so busy publishing or perishing six days a week”. Edgar then goes on to say that “Mr Leopold’s unexceptional thesis is that there is dishonesty in all of us”. She gives a brief run-down of the plot – which sounds basic on the face of it – and concludes that it’s “amusing enough, but not really solid value for your money”. So, overall, entertaining enough reads but not worth buying in a $3 hardback. (That said, don’t you think that Weidenfeld and Nicolson’s 1969 hardback cover for The love germ is pretty gorgeous!)

Finally, there’s Margaret Masterman, also writing in The Canberra Times (May 30). She reviews Colin Theile’s adult novel, Labourers in the vineyard. The review is headed “Novel improves as it goes along”. Masterman starts by quoting from the novel, then writes:

After encountering this rhetorical blast on page two of Colin Thiele’s latest novel nothing would have persuaded me to read the remaining 245 pages had I not, as a reviewer, been paid to do so.

But, she is being paid, so she continues:

As Mr Thiele gets a firm grip on his narrative however, it becomes clear that such assaults upon the natural resources of the English language are only the occasional excesses of an eloquent and highly inventive writer, one moreover who is directed by a positive if imperfectly sustained artistic purpose.

She tries to place the novel within a wider literary tradition. She suggests that Thiele “conceived Labourers in the vineyard on the lines of the traditional regional novel”, and says that

Focusing his story on a long-established German settlement in the Barossa Valley … he aims as I see it to invest “the valley” with something of the imaginative presence of Scott’s border country, George Eliot’s midlands, Mauriac’s sands and pine forests around Bordeaux, and above all Thomas Hardy’s Wessex.

She then compares the novel with Hardy’s Wessex novels, writing that

Into a modest 247 pages he has organised a remarkable variety of fictional material, much of which is nostalgically familiar to lovers of the Wessex novels. His plot is highly contrived and marked by melodramatic coincidences. The moods and predicaments of his characters are closely related to their rural environment and commented on by a chorus of humorous rustics.

Masterman discusses the book at some depth, pointing out its strengths but also its failings. Seasonal festivals and country trials, for example, “are vigorously and sometimes brilliantly described” but Thiele fails to “infuse the countryside with any genuine imaginative significance”. Because of his detailed knowledge of the region, he does give his story “an illusion of reality”. Her conclusion, however, is qualified. She’d clearly much rather be reading Hardy!

I enjoyed Labourers in the vineyard as a lavish and well organised entertainment which stirred memories of the people, the woodlands, the heaths and milky vales of a great novelist whose works in these days are too often neglected.

These are just three examples I found in my research, but they nicely exemplify some of the things that are important to me when I think about my reading. What is the writing like? How does the novel fit within its perceived “genre” (defined loosely)? How relevant is the novel to the concerns of its day?

What do you think?

Monday musings on Australian literature: on 1922: 2, Reviewers on Australianness

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This is the second post in a series I plan to do this year inspired by articles in Trove from 1922, that is, from 100 years ago. My first post was on the NSW Bookstall Company, and I have several more 1922 post ideas. However, I thought a good choice for the second one would be to share some of the things reviewers/critics/ columnists at that time were saying about “Australianness” in the writing. Representing Australia – writing Australian novels – seemed to be important. But what did that mean to them?

I’ll start by repeating something from my first 1922 post. The columnist from Freeman’s Journal (July), wrote that Vance Palmer’s upcoming book, The boss of Killara, was “an entertaining story, … most entertainingly written, and … true in every detail to Australian bush-life”. I wanted to share this again because, by the 1920s, Australia was (and had been for some time) a highly urbanised nation, and yet bush-life seemed to define us in most reviewers’ (and presumably our own) eyes. It suggests that was our point of difference from the rest of the world, regardless of the truth of our lives.

Note that not all books discussed in 1922 were published that year, but most were.

Historical fiction

I didn’t come across a lot of historical fiction, but there were some, and when I did, reviewers were interested, naturally, in whether the past was properly evoked. The Western Mail’s (November) reviewer approved of J.H.M. Abbott’s Ensign Calder, saying that “The writer’s descriptions of life in Sydney, early in the nineteenth century during the governorship of Macquarie, are very faithfully rendered”. Wikipedia’s brief article on Abbott quotes Miller and Macartney from their book, Australian literature. Miller and Macartney describe his writing as being “of a simple kind, without subtleties or motive or characterization, against a background of the Australian past as revealed by historical records, and introducing actual personages”. So, not great literary writing, but accurate. This assessment (acceptance) was, I found, also a fairly common thread in 1922.

Romance and adventure

I will write more about adventure in a later post, because it seemed to be a popular genre. However, it’s worth sharing here some reviewers’ thoughts relevant to this week’s topic.

One adventure story exponent was Walter G Henderson. He was a country solicitor and grazier, as well as writer, and his novel, Bush bred (serialised in 1918, published 1922), was an adventure romance. J. Penn, who wrote for Adelaide’s Observer, called it (July) “a truly Australian product”, then described the wild adventures of its protagonists, including on the goldfields north of Port Augusta. He notes – and I found it interesting that this is one of the things he chose to emphasise – that “the author’s knowledge of camels and their ways is extensive”. Penn also writes that the 1922 edition included a commendation from Viscount Novar who, says Penn, claims that “the preservation of fugitive incident, illustrating different phases of life in a developing country, is a valuable contribution to literature.” Here, at least, is a reference to the idea of “illustrating different phases of life”.

Another popular adventure book was Jack North’s The black opal, which The Northern Territory Times and Gazette (May), describes as “a wholesome, well-written novel in which the lure of the bush triumphs over the glamor of the city”. See!

Mrs Norman (aka Mabel) Brookes’ novel, Old desires, is set partly in Cairo, but, writes the reviewer in Adelaide’s The Mail (October),

Separate from its dramatic qualities, the book is most admirable in its prelude chapters of way-back Australian life. Description of the recognisable routine, normal and often exciting, of station experience in the great interior, has, of its kind, seldom been more truthfully achieved. Occasional conventions link it, nevertheless, to a standard of accomplishment more familiar. Harris tweeds here preserve their familiar and apparently irresistible smell. That Mary, climbing through the stockyard fence, should vouchsafe a generous display of stocking is unimpressive to reading mankind inured to daily main street exhibition requiring neither fence nor stile.

As I’ve said before about these older Trove articles, I love their formal language. Formal this may be, but we get the gist that her description of Australian (station) life is authentic, albeit her English origins can’t help creeping in. Oh, and poor Mary, showing off her stocking unnecessarily, given the (city) worldliness of her readers!

What seemed to be mostly admired about “Australian” novels was not so much their exploration of Australian identity, or other themes, or their writing, but their description of Australian life. The reviewer in Brisbane’s Telegraph (August) of William Anderson’s The silent sin says

The great merit of this story in our eyes is that it is thoroughly Australian. The characters are Australian, and for the most part the scenes are laid in New South Wales and Queensland. For the rest it is told without pretension to literary ornament. 

Realist fiction

Then as now, older books were given new life, and one such book was William Lane’s 1892 novel The workingman’s paradise (my review). The report is not about a new publication, but about its being serialised in Brisbane’s Daily Standard (August). The columnist writes – remember, this is 30 years after its original publication – that

It is truly a remarkable book, more remarkable now, perhaps, than when it was published, because it is as inspiring to-day as it was intended to be then, and its story of the class struggle and road that lies before the Labor movement has increased in significance by the developments of the last quarter-century.

At last, a book that deals with some critical issues! Yes, yes, I’m showing my colours, I know, but I’m sure that won’t surprise you!

This is a brief, and superficial survey, but it comes from several pages of Trove hits and is a fair representation of what I saw as trends at the time. I have found some, let us say, outlier articles, which I will also share as 2022 progresses!

On being a taxonomical reviewer

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I was reading a review this morning of a poetry anthology, and the reviewer, one Dr. Martin Duwell I believe, said that the book “encourages the taxonomist in me”. Ah, I thought, a person after my own heart … because I too have a taxonomical bent in my approach to literature. (I am, it has to be said, a librarian/archivist by training/profession, but I suspect the choice of profession followed the bent, rather than vice versa!). Anyhow, back to the topic in hand.

It is natural I think to apply some level of taxonomical* thinking to reviews of anthologies. How have the poems/stories been organised? It’s rarely random. Sometimes it’s simply chronological or alphabetical (as in The best Australian poems 2009 that I mentioned in a recent Monday musings); sometimes there’s a clear thematic grouping, with headings perhaps (as in Dorothy Porter‘s The bee hut); sometimes it’s more subtle, more organic, with the component parts flowing from one to the other, in which cases the reader may or may discern the connection; and sometimes, perhaps, it really is random. The challenge for we taxonomical reviewers of course is to work out whether the last truly is the case – or, have we missed something? It can exercise the brain exceedingly!

Cahill Expressway loop

Cahill Expressway loop - not the painting but this image can be used! (Courtesy: Angus Fraser, via Wikipedia, using CC-BY-2.0)

Having considered the organisation issue, the next thing the taxonomical reviewer thinks about is: are there over-riding themes or styles or [pick your issue]? Sometimes, there is and it’s very clear, such as in those short story collections specifically gathered around a theme. I have a few in my collection, including Sisters compiled by Brigid McConville (in which the writers explore – well – it’s obvious from the title, isn’t it?) and Expressway compiled by Helen Daniel (in which the writers were invited to respond to Jeffrey Smart‘s painting “Cahill expressway”). But sometimes it’s not so obvious, as in, say Nam Le‘s highly-varied-in-voice-and-subject matter collection, The boat. Besides the possibly cop-out but nonetheless valid-enough idea (given the author’s personal history) that it’s about the diversity of human experience, I did glean a theme of survival running through the collection. I may be right, or I may be wrong, but it satisfies my need to comprehend the work as a whole, as well as its component parts.

But, the truly taxonomical reviewer (reader), will also approach a single work like a novel, taxonomically. And I – we, I presume – do this largely by looking at the structure. How has the work been put together, and why. Is it told chronologically in one voice? Is it a multiple point-of-view novel? Is the voice first-person, third person or even, occasionally, second-person? Where, in particular, writers have diverged from the more traditional chronological-one voice structure, why have they done so?  And, more importantly, has it worked? Why did Martin Amis write Time’s arrow in rewind? Why did Jim Crace use his four-part backwards-forwards structure in Being dead? Why did Jane Austen set up her “sense” and “sensibility” (or “pride” and “prejudice”) dichotomy? Why, and I will be discussing this in a coming review, did Mario Vargas Llosa use the rather complex multiple-point-of-view structure in The feast of the goat? The answers to these questions often help me locate the essential meaning of the work. That is, the meaning of the work for me.

I realise that this may all sound rather mechanistic and, if applied rigidly, it could be – but I think that for we taxonomical reviewers this approach is just one of the pens in our pencil-case. Sometimes there is nothing really to categorise/dissect or the categorisation/dissection is straightforward, but sometimes it can help. Sometimes, in a large, complex, unwieldy and/or diverse work, it can help us get to the core. The trick, though, is to be flexible. Elinor and Marianne in Sense and sensibility may, respectively, stand generally for those two character traits, but if we try to bind our analysis too closely to those dichotomies, not only will we tie ourselves in knots, but we’ll miss the fundamental humanity of Austen’s worldview. In other worse, to paraphrase Hamlet, it doesn’t do to think too “precisely on th’ event”. Rather, keep it loose, and meaning just might appear …

* I define “taxonomical” loosely to mean, categorising, ordering, structuring.