On the other hand there is no simple correlation between good reviews and a book’s success, or the opposite, in fact hostile reviews seem sometimes to have a positive effect, so reviewers are not always omnipotent, and should beware of hubris. Though the worst fate a book can suffer is not to be reviewed at all, which seems to emphasise the critic’s power. I think the truth is probably more mundane. People are busy, they glance at reviews, read perhaps the first and last paragraphs, skip over the dense bits. What they remember is not what was said but merely the fact of the review’s existence. The message may be largely semiotic: the size of the article, its place on the page, its author (the star?), the presence of a picture; the content is rarely, or only temporarily, registered. Which suggests that the people with the real power are literary editors; they choose who does the review, and how to feature it. All may be in the layout.

The only person who really absorbs, who reads marks learns and inwardly digests, is the reviewee. The reservations imprint on the mind, the praise hardly impinges.

I know of some writers who never read reviews at all because it is too traumatic. Others get their spouses to vet them. I’m not so strongminded, or so weak-minded – I can’t decide which. So I sometimes suffer enragement, or deep wounding, but I prefer to know. And there may be something to be learned, after the hurt has healed.

For reviewers can be extraordinarily cruel; nasty, sneering, brutal. Your morals, taste and hygiene are all a matter for risibility. All sorts of charming people who would be entirely friendly were they to meet you are quite prepared to savage not just your book but you in print. Margaret Drabble once said to me, Now you have looked me in the eye you won’t be able to review a book of mine again. I think that could provide a good rule of thumb for reviewers: would I say these things to this writer’s face? It’s one I haven’t always followed.

You can see I’m jumping from one side of the fence to the other, at one moment reviewer, the next reviewee. Is this an ideal situation? Or should the two never meet? Where do reviewers come from? How are they trained?

It’s one of the few trades where anybody can say I am a professional, hang up her tile and tout for business. I like reading books, ergo I am, qualified to judge them. Some think that by virtue of another training, the academic, they have the skills. There are dichotomies between practitioners and observers. Some people believe that writers shouldn’t review one another, that the practice is incestuous, or a form of internecine war, that it is a kind of moral nepotism, or, a phrase made famous in a controversy of several years ago about the attention women were getting, of pissing in one another’s pockets. That it is monstrously unfair in every direction. Certain writers claim that it is a purely Australian habit, which is manifestly untrue; people such as Updike and Carver and Burgess and Byatt not only review one another in newspaper and journal articles, but collect these ephemera into books. It’s a habit as old as reviewing itself, it’s a traditional form of hack work for writers, who need the money.

Academics may claim to be purer of motive, and they’re certainly different from writers: they have regular incomes. This does not make them unbiased or honest or understanding; often the reverse. Remember the old jibe: those who can, do, those who can’t, teach …? Clearly unkind, and overlooking the fact that sometimes the best doers are the best teachers, but also encapsulating a feeling strongly felt. ‘Like its variant: those who can, do, those who can’t, review, an even harsher judgement because of the way the niggling of the rhyme turns it into a jingle and makes it still more epigrammatic.

I’ve sometimes thought that a prerequisite for all reviewers should be the writing of a book themselves, and especially when novelists are on the receiving end, a work of imaginative fiction. In my case I learned a lot; I became a lot more generous and I think more just when I’d been through the process myself. I became aware that nearly every book, however flawed, however clumsy or dull or bad, is a serious and slaved-over work, a creation of the spirit as well as the brain, and it must be considered seriously. No light dismissals, no clever cuts, no sarcastic self-indulgences. I say nearly all, because some books are such commercial enterprises they are fair game, like Lace or Thorn Birds, and you can have great fun with them knowing that any hurt you may cause (and anyway not believing that your puny arrows will even pierce the skin) will be pleasantly soothed by all the money they make.

Unfortunately, the no reviewing without doing adage doesn’t necessarily work. Writers are not always as open to other people’s books as ideally they might be. Some seem to think that a good book threatens them; if A’s book is good, maybe mine isn’t. Or, if there are twenty good books published in a year then perhaps there won’t be room for a twenty-first. Or, let’s demolish the competition. Writers aren’t saints; such mean thoughts are comprehensible. But not necessarily appropriate; I think a society in which good books flourish has more room for more than a society where there are none or few. I could bring in gardens and desert metaphors, but metaphors don’t prove anything. Though they make good pictures – a whole landscape of green and blooming books beside an arid waste with one prickly cactus.

My ideal critics are rarely academics, who too easily go off into sub specie aeternitatis mode, instead of realising that books, especially novels, are a practical way for society to deal with what is going on in it now and should be read in that present context. Who cares about the context of eternity? Perishables are delicious within the use-by date. Posterity can judge whether it wants to read them in ten or fifty or a hundred years; what the reviewer should tell u1 ls whether it works now. Who cares if it isn’t Aristotle or Patrick White or Thomas Mann or the Great Australian Novel we’re all supposed to be waiting for (and which I reckon will creep up on us in a secretive way and we won’t even notice for ages, by which time there’ll probably be six of it – and maybe I should have couched this aside in the past tense), what we want to know is how useful, illuminating, interesting it is at this very moment.

Other writers, if they can overcome their bile, angst, schadenfreude, uxoriousness, make good guides. And there is a tiny third party of people, reviewers who are neither writers nor academics, and do not come bearing bagsful of axes to grind. They are often excellent. Occasionally wrongheaded, or cranky, but usually honest.

That’s the most important thing, honesty. It’s what you seek in the book you are reading, and in what the reviewer says about it. It involves reading the book that’s written, there on the page before you, and not the one you wish the author had written, or you yourself would have written, had you had the time. It means not reading through the corrective spectacles of fashionable theory. It involves paying attention to the writer’s intention (which may not have been conscious, but is there) and judging first of all that intention, and then its working out. It involves receptivity, and meeting more than half way, and generosity. It requires not telling the plot, above all not the ending. It means no cheap scorings off, and most particularly not reviewing a bad book just for the fun of tearing it to pieces. We all know that a lot of people use reviews as a substitute for reading books rather than a guide to doing so, but that’s no excuse for virtuosi performances of no relevance to anything but the critic’s ego. It requires constant examination of your own motives and responses. Reviewing is a profession, and should be self-regulating; if doctors and lawyers claim they can maintain proper standards for themselves so should reviewers, even if the level of surveillance must be individual.

This doesn’t mean you can never say a cross word, or a sharp one. Nor that you can’t point out that a book is no good, or doesn’t work. But remember: How would you go looking me in the eye and saying that? Okay, print is a protection, and so it should be, and yes, you have your integrity and you must tell the truth. So long as you’ve thought about it from both sides. And remembered that truth is many.

When I wrote about Barbara Hanrahan’s Goodnight Mr Moon after her death I realised that a good review should be part of a dialogue, or rather a conversation, between writer and reader and reader’s proxy – I mean of course the reviewer. Maybe painful at times and with its measures of anger and disappointment as well as pleasure and delight. And having a particular context in time and place, coming after and happening alongside. Of course this is an idealistic view, but perhaps not impossible or even uncommon, or so I understood from my sadness at the absence of one of the parties to the Barbara Hanrahan conversation. I think that if more reviewers kept in mind the notion of their role in this three-sided exploration and understanding of a work of art, the quality of our own work would increase.