I have, I think, become a lot more selective about the targets of this nuclear option in the critical armoury. On the whole, I believe, the primary victims should always be influential, powerful, famous; those authors acclaimed by conformists and encircled by flatterers. The last time I consciously unsheathed the hatchet was in response to the matching piles of narcissistic trash recently dumped by Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone. But rare exceptions arrive when a book, even by a total unknown, spreads not sweetness and light but poison and murk – when its effect may be seriously pernicious, in cultivating harmful lies or fomenting hatred.
Hence my mixed feelings about the new "Hatchet Job of the Year" award, run by The Omnivore website and designed to reward eloquent vituperation in the book-reviewing trade. (It turns out, by the way, that one of the judges is a certain Rachel Johnson.) Its prize will be a year's supply of potted shrimp. The shortlist does feature a piece of high-grade butchery from The Independent: Lachlan Mackinnon's disembowelling of Geoffrey Hill's latest volume, Clavics. I deeply admire Hill (though not for this book), but Oxford's much-garlanded, and now knighted, Professor of Poetry surely ranks as a legitimate target. Likewise, one may disagree with Geoff Dyer's haughty mockery of Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending (I do) or David Sexton's weary impatience with Carol Ann Duffy's The Bees (ditto), but these critics have - as critics should - trained their heaviest fire on the mighty of the literary world.
However, the Omnivore axe-merchants need to think straight about the purpose of their stunt. Another entry on their shortlist is Camilla Long's Sunday Times review of With the Kisses of his Mouth by Monique Roffey: an erotic memoir by the Trinidad-born novelist. Now, Roffey has appeared on the Orange Prize shortlist but in no sense counts as a big beast. Moreover, her book courted all the dangers of exposure and potential humiliation that such intimate memoirs will – our reviewer warmly applauded its bravery and integrity. Long, meanwhile, works as a star profile-writer for Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Times and recently won the "interviewer of the year" title at the British Press Awards. So when she set about Roffey's book in one of Murdoch's musclebound organs, this was a notable case of the powerful mugging the vulnerable.
An award celebrating vitriolic outbursts? Yuck!
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