I’ve been doing some book reviewing recently. It’s an important, but sometimes brittle art. I read a lot of book reviews, using them to make purchases and to help me in my academic work; but they’re also essential for maintaining a broad intellectual perspective. If a review’s editorial policy is right, a subscriber should be able to build up from it annually a good sense of the important trends in publishing: where the strong currents are taking us; where the main centres lie; what the colourful, eccentric outliers are. So, I subscribe to the Times Literary Supplement and Athens Review of Books, and keep an eye on The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books through Twitter. The arrival of the TLS every Thursday is certainly one of the highlights of my week.
When I am reviewing, I tend to agonise over things. I’ve never reviewed anything from which I haven’t learned something I didn’t know before. So I try to avoid too much qualitative assessment: the notion that I am passing a verdict. Of course, peer review is important and salutary; bad books are published from time to time and it may be important to identify them as such. But I don’t like the high-handed review or murderous review by a thousand pedantic cuts. I always try not only to give a fair account of the book itself and to reflect on the underlying issues: what is at stake here? what is the book teaching us? But I try also to situate myself in relation to the book: why am I reviewing it? what value is my opinion adding? The best pieces that I read are often those for which the review editor has given the reviewer a generous word limit and two or three books to consider; the article can then weave in and out of the books and the reviewer’s own insights. There are masterly pieces like this in every edition of the TLS, ARB, NYRB, LRB.
The two reviews that I’ve finished writing were of important and interesting books, and I’ll post links to them when they issue. As ever, some of the enjoyment of reading books closely and carefully lies in the extraction of further reading lists. Thanks to one of those I’ve just reviewed, I’m now half-way through Robert Liddell’s engrossing, opinionated book on Aegean Greece (1954). Liddell was hooked on the idea that the central hero of the Aegean was Theseus, and he spends some time locating and explicating the scenes of the myth: perhaps the most captivating is his account of Troezen and Poros – well worth comparing with Mary Renault’s novels The Bull from the Sea and The King Must Die. But there is much else of interest, not least the author’s enthusiasm for the architecture of Mykonos, Folegandros and Amorgos – at a time well before the arrival of mass tourism. And he describes the Aegean beautifully; here is part of his description of the Argo-Saronic Gulf:
The journey continues and the villages of Methana become visible; that blue silhouette takes on the actuality of grey rock, sprinkled with olive trees. But though the outline of Methana has now lost its almost magical beauty, there are the two lovely forms of the islands to be seen: behind is Aegina with its sharp peak, Prophet Elias; and in front are the gently rising domes of Poros. Here in the Saronic gulf we are still in the nome of Attica, and here sea and mountain are transfigured by the clear Attic light – a light only equalled by the extraordinary Apollonian radiance of Delos.
It puts me in mind of the need to organise our summer holiday.
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I’ve had some bad health in the last fortnight or so, and have spent quite some time with the GPs in my local medical practice and with the paramedics, nursing and medical staff of St George’s Hospital, Tooting. It is St George’s Day today: a good opportunity to record my admiration for the professionalism, compassion and care of staff in general practice and at our local hospital. The NHS may not be a perfect institution (what is?), but when we need it and call on it and find it there to support us, we have every reason to be grateful for it. I for one am very grateful.
John
St George’s Day, 2019
