REVIEWING THE REVIEWER

Do writers make good reviewers?

Guardian blogger Claire Armitstead has her say..............

How do you structure a review? It's the question students always ask, and I've always felt that the standard journalistic answer - invoking a pyramid structure of importance with your eye-catching intro at the top - is inadequate, because it's based on the narcissistic principle that what you're writing is more important than the object under review.

The issue was thrown into sharp relief the other day when I was discussing an edit with the critic Hilary Mantel. She was reviewing a book about the dissolution of the monasteries, and I questioned the order of two paragraphs, which I felt would read more fluently the other way round.
Hilary agreed, but made a very important point. She admired the book, but had issues over a couple of points which may not even have been the author's fault:
"I think I was just wanting to make sure to leave the reader on a positive note and not stress the criticisms too much, so I was burying them in the middle. It's always a problem, I think, whether to mention what seem like editorial glitches. If you make too much of them you look like a gleeful pedant but if you don't mention them you look like a careless reader."

Like many book reviewers, Hilary is an author herself, so is alert to injuries that can be inflicted by a clumsily structured review, even if it is basically positive. "There's something disheartening, if you're the author of the book, about a review which goes, 'Oh, very nice, nice, nice...' - then, at the three-quarter point, switches tone - 'nevertheless, it must be said...' Also, if you are the writer of a nitpicking review, aren't you just giving hostages to fortune? That will surely be the very time you mistype or misread or misquote something."

Literary editors are habitually criticised for employing writers as reviewers on the basis that you can't trust them not to logroll for their friends. But Hilary's response tells a different story of an experienced writer using skill and insight to make a fair and accurate assessment of someone else's work. Surely that's exactly what every good critic should be doing?