Rotten reviews

They happen to us all

1. The powers that used to be

2. Sailing into Ulysses

3. A midsummer night’s fever dream

4. The faults of the useless sisters

5. The Great Gatsby: negligible, soft, slack

6. In passing

1. There is a book that sits on a shelf at eye level where I work. It’s called Rotten Reviews - a Literary Companion. I’ve not flipped through it in years. And years. But a day or so ago I did and found that it had been a birthday present from friends back in 1989. The inscription reads: “Stephen Gray [see note 7 below] has nothing on these.” I suspect this was to buck me up after, Stephen - I knew him fairly well back in the 1970s - had given me a bad review for my first novel, The Powers That Be. My friends were right, nothing can be as savage as the excerpts in Rotten Reviews.

2. Here is Virginia Woolf on James Joyce’s Ulysses: “I finished Ulysses and think it is a misfire… The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious but in the literary sense. A first rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky.”

3. Or Samuel Pepys on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “The most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life”. Actually, I agree with that.

4. Or this, by a forgotten critic on Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights: “Here all the faults of Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Bronte) are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.” Yes, well.

5. Finally, a note on my favourite novel, the one hundred-year-old, The Great Gatsby: “A little slack, a little soft, more than a little artificial. The Great Gatsby falls into the class of negligible novels” - Springfield Republican.

6. Stephen Gray died three years ago. He was a novelist, poet, playwright, biographer, literary scholar, editor, academic, and, as mentioned above, a critic.