A couple of examples will suffice. Rubenstein argues that I speculate about Israel’s impending demise ‘with barely disguised glee’. It’s surely better disguised than that, and any reasonable reader will struggle to find it. The claim is patently ludicrous. ‘Every page of this book,’ Rubenstein pontificates, ‘is pervaded by a deep distaste for Zionism.’ It amounts to a ‘thinly-veiled call’ for the elimination of Israel as an alien crusader state. If that wasn’t such a serious accusation, it would be laughable. As it stands, it reflects the sad reality that for some of Israel’s supporters any criticism of the country and its policies, any speculation about the very real dilemmas it faces, is heresy. This denial mentality, and the seeming Pavlovian readiness to label all critics as blood enemies, does Israel’s cause – and the cause of Israeli–Palestinian peace – little good.

It is fascinating to observe that Rubenstein’s diatribe against Herzl’s Nightmare is starkly at odds with the very positive reviews the book has received elsewhere: for example, in The Age, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sun Herald and The Canberra Times. I guess for Rubenstein all those reviewers must be in on the plot. Or perhaps they’ve read the book I wrote, not the one of his fevered imagination.

Peter Rodgers, Former Australian Ambassador to Israel, Queanbeyan, NSW

A petty jihad

Dear Editor,

Ivor Indyk has waged a relentless and unseemly campaign against Black Inc.’s ‘Best of’ series for publishing pieces from HEAT without compensation to HEAT. In the December 2004–January 2005 issue of ABR, he wrote of a ‘legal loophole’ in our literary culture which allows authors to publish work more than once unless they sign away that right. With respect, I would call that the law, not a loophole in it. He seems to think that he is a shareholder in the author’s copyright. He is not. And besides, I simply don’t believe that republishing a piece six months after it appears in HEAT can affect HEAT’s sales. Indyk would be much better served directing his energies towards promoting his journal rather than waging his petty jihad against Black Inc., of which the ABR piece is but the publicly aired tip of the iceberg.

Our literary culture is a fragile one and scapegoating is not the answer. I sincerely believe that our ‘Best of’ series promotes good writing of the kind published by the literary journals and increases the size of the market. The writers are happy to be published, paid and acknowledged, and what’s good for writers in this small culture of ours must surely be good for all of us, including the publishing industry. Black Inc. has proudly published this series for seven years and will continue to do so while it has the support of our best writers and the reading public.

Morry Schwartz, Publisher, Black Inc., Melbourne, Vic.

No mere legal loophole

Dear Editor,

I read Ivor Indyk’s Commentary in the December 2004–January 2005 issue of ABR, and while I sympathise with many of the problems of small literary magazines that he recounts, I must correct some of the misconceptions in his piece.

Indyk writes of a ‘legal loophole’ in Australia’s literary culture. The Copyright Act 1968 and its amendments are hardly a loophole, nor is the protection it offers literary creators, which makes Indyk’s assertion that ‘this part of the literary world has remained open and unregulated’ extremely contentious. The Copyright Act is the regulator of the problem he describes, and, as a regulator, the Act works very well for writers. Indyk’s problem is that of a publisher; he seeks to do more than he is legally entitled to do. I reiterate, this is not a loophole; this is a basis for negotiation.

Currently, when HEAT agrees to publish an author’s work, convention has it that the author implicitly offers the publisher first publication rights. No other right is granted. Copyright and further publication rights, such as anthology rights, remain with the author, who is free to exercise them for appropriate remuneration or otherwise, entirely at the author’s prerogative.

Of course, with reasonable and adequate remuneration, it is conceivable that HEAT and the author could come to some mutually beneficial agreement, preferably in writing, which would achieve the ‘respect’ that Indyk seeks. Such an agreement need not be complex or administratively onerous, as Indyk suggests. But, as we all know, appropriate remuneration is the nub of the problem. I suspect literary magazines are financially unable to offer authors the same money they could get for both first publication and later anthologisation. And Indyk cannot expect authors to forgo anthology opportunities when he is offering nothing in return.

Jeremy Fisher, Executive Director, ASA, Sydney, NSW

Book reviewing

Dear Editor,

I am glad that Peter Rose is not a Dale Peck – there is a point at which such reviewing becomes merely sadistic, I think – but I like the general point that he (adopting Kenneth Tynan’s approach) makes in his essay ‘The Sound and the Fury: Uneasy Times for Hacks and Critics’ (ABR, December 2004–January 2005): that reviewers must criticise books on their merits, making way for the good by sweeping aside the bad. It seems to me that relatively few critics in newspapers have much to say that is genuinely peppery. This tepidity allows both too many bad books to survive critically and not enough genuinely good books to shine.

On the other hand, even a badly written book has cost the author blood and sweat, and brutality in review is unnecessary to make the point. Honesty does not necessarily entail savagery. For example, while I generally respect Peter Craven’s work, I thought his slashing of Elliott Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity in this magazine (November 2003) played the man more than the book and reduced Craven’s own authority to make the judgment he made of the book.

In a review of Dale Peck’s Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction (New York Review of Books, 15 July 2004), Daniel Mendelsohn argued that Peck’s vitriolic approach to criticism gave many readers pleasure, in the sense of schadenfreude, but that it was ‘not the road to serious critical work ... The serious critic, after all, is measured – and judged – as much as by what and how he praises as by what and how he blames; and he should be as stimulated by the pleasure he gets from his reading as he is by the pain.’ The first duty of book reviewers, however intelligent and well-read, is not to entertain their readers but to lead them to what is worthwhile and away from the dross. Sadism in a book review is both self-regarding and self-indulgent; it panders to the worst in the reader, but is incapable of inspiration. A critic who seeks merely to slam-dunk writers is failing his or her readers. That said, Rose correctly and properly rebuffed the woman who suggested that ABR should ‘promote’ Oz Lit. Once the main magazine of book reviews in this country starts publishing puff pieces we are lost. Some books should be strangled at birth, and it is the most mediocre sort of patriotism that suggests we should favour Australian books just because they are written or published here. We need to find the proper measure in our criticism.

Finally, could I pick up one point that Peter Rose makes? He comments that it is important for a critic to place the book under review in the context of the author’s work. I agree. I also think that, at least in relation to non-fiction works, it is important to place it in the context of the body of work in the field. If the critic is not an authority in his or her own right, he or she has to do the research to enable the reader to place the book against its own background. Too often, in my view, reviewers write about history and other non-fiction books as though they had a virgin birth – a disservice to the educated reader.

Hugh Dillon, Sydney, NSW

Henry Ergas replies to Rob Watts

Dear Editor,

To say I find Rob Watts’s reply to my letter (ABR, November 2004) strange would be an understatement. Watts starts off by claiming that, far from ‘the dissatisfied customer-reader’ of ABR that I ‘pose’ as being, I am a ‘heavy-hitting neo-liberal economist’ (ABR, December 2004–January 2005). Good lord: even if that were true (and it is far too flattering), are ‘heavy-hitting neo-liberal economists’ no longer allowed to be readers of ABR?

But matters get worse, for Watts exposes what he clearly regards as my dark links to CIS – the institution at which Professor Peter Saunders, the author of the book he reviewed, Australia’s Welfare Habit and How to Kick It, works. These are links, Watts suggests, that any decent person would have ‘declared’. The nature of those links? One of my fifty or so colleagues has been associated with CIS! All those who know communists are themselves communists; all those who work with CIS associates are themselves CIS associates … Need one say more?

The pity of all this is that Watts simply misinterprets my concern about his review (ABR, October 2004). My concern was not that he had criticised the book at issue; rather, that he had not done so in a way that engaged with any of the book’s arguments. Those arguments, it seems to me, merit careful and rigorous scrutiny, especially in terms of the inferences Professor Saunders seeks to draw from the data he has assembled. Watts’s review was, in that sense, a missed opportunity for a serious debate about issues of great importance to all Australians.

As for discussing with Rob Watts the ethical issues that underpin social policy, I am of course happy to do that. But if he expects me to do so as a ‘leading neo-liberal advocate’, I fear he may be disappointed, for the issues are surely far too complex for labels, caricatures and name-calling to play any useful role.

Henry Ergas, Canberra, ACT

Barry Donovan replies to Neal Blewett

Dear Editor,

Neal Blewett’s review of my book Mark Latham: The Circuitbreaker (ABR, December 2004–January 2005) reflected the perceptive mind of one of Labor’s best federal ministers, but I must make three comments.

Like Dr Blewett in his conclusion, I made the final point: Labor now has three further years to rebuild, and the experience of Gough Whitlam between 1969 (his first loss) and 1972 (his first victory) provides an important political precedent.

Secondly, I did not just rely on Latham’s statement in Parliament to defend his record in Liverpool, and was not ‘content’ to do so. I researched every copy of the Liverpool Leader published when Latham was a councillor and then mayor, and quoted extensively from reports and comments made by that paper and its reporters during that period. The Leader is owned by News Ltd.

Thirdly, it is a great pity that Neal Blewett, as with other reviewers, did not mention the excellent cartoons by John Spooner that appear in my book. I’ve always been a great admirer of Melbourne’s cartoonists in particular, and was delighted when John agreed to have his insightful work (and comments) included.

Barry Donovan, Brunswick, Vic.

A brave new venture

Dear Editor,

More often than not, for the obvious reason, the reviews we read are of books we haven’t yet read. It thus opens up a whole new dimension when the work under review is one you have read and enjoyed enormously.

Cameron Woodhead (ABR, November 2004), in appraising Robert Gott’s first novel, Good Murder, either chooses to ignore mentioning the enormous, parodic fun of the thriller, or is, alas, devoid of any real sense of humour, querulously homing in on tiny points that, anachronistic or not, are part of the donnée of such a far-fetched farce. Of course, no one would have performed naked in Maryborough in 1942, but who cares? When we read or watch Julius Caesar and hear a clock chime, do we bucket the play because Shakespeare got a detail wrong? Yes, the narrator hero is a bumbling, unlikeable, narcissistic fool, which in itself is a supreme novelty in this overpopulated, often over-serious genre; this is the comic core of the novel, which sadly, inexplicably, Woodhead finds unfunny.

To dismiss such a brave new venture and deny the author’s genuine talent and originality by suggesting the book ‘abjectly fails to impress’ is not only imperceptive, but cruel and deceitful to the reading public.

Graham Rodger, Rosanna, Vic.