The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal should be immediately reconvened to deal with book reviewers in the commercial press. Book reviewing in Australia is by and large in a condition not widely suffered since papyrus got the nod over clay tablets and is an excellent example of the politics of patronage. ‘Literary Editors’ (which is surely as much an oxymoron as ‘Liberal leadership’) look upon reviewing as positions in their gift, to be dished out to those amongst their friends and associates who are either indigent or self-indulgent. In some cases this leads to first rate reviews by learned and entertaining writers. In the vast majority the consequence is either summaries of plots or anodyne psycho-babble which has less to do with the book than the reviewer’s thoughts on whatever has happened to take his/her fancy. Indeed the major apparent qualification of many book reviewers is to be chums with the editor. The most obvious example of this occurred several years back when possibly the most significant scholarly work on slavery in the United States of the last twenty years was reviewed by a prominent Aboriginal poet. Now this poet is unquestionably a credit to the craft but it escapes this hack what qualified the citizen to comment on a book of profound erudition in such a specialised discipline.

The other great misuse of the books pages is the manner in which they are treated as a field of combat for private wars. Thus books are denounced or praised less on their relative merits than on whether the author’s factional allegiances are pleasing to the reviewer. It also works the other way, as in a recent case where a reviewer announced that a (different) poet’s book was so good that it could only be assumed that God doubles as a dictation typist and took down the author’s every pellucid word. So present number one for Linley would be the promise that reviews would be commissioned solely from persons of letters who are capable of critically analysing a book in a way which is meaningful and relevant to the ordinary reader and who will confine themselves to such. This hack pays due obeisance to the popular belief that we are blessedly living in a golden age of Australian creative writing. In the interests of brevity it is left to the gentle reader to ponder upon the wonders of a culture which glories in an alphabet of talent from Anderson, Jessica to Zwicky, Fay. The recent triumph of Mr Peter Carey can only be garlanded with a victor’s crown, (although this hack is not looking forward to the mass of pretenders who will now proceed to publish novels about a pair of compulsive Monopoly players obsessed with their dream of constructing a refuge for single mothers out of organically grown mung beans in Kakadu National Park).

Yet the vast majority of well written Australian fiction (which admittedly narrows the field down somewhat) is ever so serious. There is a mass of novels that are admired for their vision and quality of prose but are consumed more as a social duty than as self-indulgent entertainment. Few are the books by Australian authors that are suitable for sophisticated eyes which can be pleasurably read on a beach. ‘Where’ is this hack’s plaintive plea ‘are the Australian equivalents of A.N. Wilson, Martin Amis, Tom Wolfe or Gore Vidal?’ and he will just have to endure the sneers of his betters now his manifestly plebeian tastes are revealed.

Present number two for Linley would be less salacious sagas on the one hand and less meditations on the psychic poverty of Australian life communicated via metaphors of our national tradition of cruelty to women, blacks, dolphins, school teachers and lesser known indigenous rodents on the other. In the place of such what he would like to unwrap beneath the tree (a native of course) would be a whole swag of novels which he could read with simple pleasure. Novels in short which are merely intended to engage and amuse. This hack could go on to a length which would tax even the celebrated patience of the editor of this esteemed journal about other bookish boons and bounties the receipt of which would bring a light to his drink-sodden old eyes but he will despairingly forbear. Better book reviews? More intelligent popular novels? Both may well be coming but so are all the Christmases in the third millennia. Bah humbugs of the season.