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Book reviewers always have one question, at the point of accepting a commission: "How long is it?" They are not hoping, as buyers of mass-market fiction usually are, that it's a really good substantial read. They are praying that the book is not too long.

Reviewing books is not a particularly well-paid form of journalism and it takes time. A book of any more ambition than a thriller can't be read for review at a rate of more than 40, or at most 60, pages an hour. Some books are only 120-pages long and can comfortably be digested in a couple of hours. Others, though, are 400, or 600 pages, or, in some dreadful instances, even more, and they can easily take days to get through.

The reviewer's fee, however, usually remains the same. So, shocking as it may seem, the truth is that some reviewers skip some books. And there are a few who skip through all the books.

They have to be good to get away with it. The more conscientious reviewers enjoy a privileged position. They are able to see the book before anybody else. So they can perform a useful task by simply describing it to a readership which has not had that advantage. What's more, while it is not so easy as you may think to have complete and certain knowledge of a longish text, it's a doddle compared to acquiring complete and certain knowledge of the outside world, which most other journalists have to attempt. The whole thing is right there, on your desk. You can check your facts until you are sure. Some books even have an index.

Yet, believe it or not, there are reviewers who just throw away such a head start. In the States, one such has just come to grief. In the New York Times Book Review, a professor of creative writing, Beverly Lowry, reviewed a book by one of the people involved in the Whitewater affair, The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk by Susan McDougal. An Arkansas newspaper columnist, Gene Lyons, soon spotted that Lowry's review contained a basic error about whether or not the author eventually testified in court (she did).

"Yo, Beverly. Next time, read the damned book," he urged, arguing that "assuming minimal competence, Lowry simply cannot have done so".

The New York Times has subsequently had to publish a correction.
Most reviewers who don't read the whole book take greater care than this to avoid exposing themselves. They take issue only with specific sections of the work. They never make sweeping negative assertions ("there is no mention anywhere in this book of ..."). They deliver wellturned essays about subjects they already know about (Napoleon, say, or the national health) and then add just a few kind words about the publication in hand ("as X says, in this lively account").

Most particularly, they do not write scathing condemnations, for authors are more inclined to forgive errors when they come floating in a warm bath of praise than when they come coated in vitriol. Evelyn Waugh said that when he began reviewing he followed a simple rule, never to give a notice to a book he had not read. Sidney Smith famously went further: "I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so."

Following these simple precepts, many of our best known and, in some ways, our best reviewers have been able to carry on undetected for year after year. These are the contributors that literary editors know can be relied upon never to turn down a commission and then to deliver publishable copy far quicker than the dullards who insist on first plodding through every word. Indeed, sometimes our wizards don't plod through any words at all.

My predecessor as literary editor in this paper, A.N. Wilson, told a remarkable story in a book of essays called Secrets of the Press. He had rung the historian Paul Johnson to ask him to review a big book - more than 800 pages - on the American Civil War. To give Johnson more time, Wilson asked his assistant to have it biked over that same day. The next morning, she admitted she had forgotten to send it and that it was still sitting on her desk.

At that moment, "the fax machine had begun to whirr into action, and 800 perfectly formed words on the American Civil War, with observant comments on the merits and faults of the book, had dropped into the intray. I saw no reason not to publish this review", says Wilson. "Like all really good journalists, Paul had somehow intuited the true nature of the thing under discussion."

Now, A.N. Wilson believes all journalism to be a form of imaginative literature rather than "an exact science", so this incident, too, may have been somewhat shaped by the crebadative impulse. But we must believe him, when in the same piece, he cheerfully announces: "I have lost count of the number of dull books I have hailed as masterpieces, rather than trouble myself to finish."

Few other professional reviewers, however, so blithely divulge their working methods. When it was suggested that he did not read all of the books he reviewed, the historian Norman Stone protested and won an apology - even though many of his undergraduates at Cambridge still seem to remember him dictating pieces on the phone in somewhat improvisatory fashion, while urgently riffling through the volume in question.

Literary editors say they can always spot such reviews - appearing in other pages than their own. "I read a review recently of Paul Auster's latest novel, which I also reviewed," says Erica Wagner of The Times. "Throughout the whole review the main character's name was wrong. That was striking to me."

Another editor, on a Sunday paper, optimistically says of one reviewer, a medical specialist, that he "may be a quick reader", but he is a little more sceptical of another prominent historian. "Some people turn it round so quickly they can't possibly have read it." But, in any case, reading the words per se is not all that matters, he suggests. With some well-known reviewers, a pre-lunch and a postlunch review are quite different to the experienced eye. "If they do it after lunch, they might as well not have read the book."

Is this all so shocking? After all, in private life, nobody sane reads all books through. Dr Johnson was positively scornful of the practice. When told that a clergyman recommended it, he called it strange advice. "A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?"

Pointing to Captain Cook's three volumes about his Voyage to the Pacific, this Johnson asked: "Who will read them through? A man had better work his way before the mast, than read them through; they will be eaten by rats and mice, before they are read through." And he followed his own advice. "He had a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of perusing it from beginning to end," said Boswell.

But although many reviewers would like to think so, they are not Dr Johnson and they are not private citizens either. They are there professionally, to try these books to the end on our behalf and save us from the trouble. They are like the canaries that used to be sent down the mines, to be asphyxiated if necessary, as a signal to the rest of us.

Or, let us say now, like the chickens that are to be carried into battle in the Gulf on top of American tanks in a similar role - as Poultry Chemical Confirmation Detectors. Tough work, yes, but somebody's got to do it.

So no shirking - and no skipping, please.

 

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