The plot sickens
Sir: No one likes to be told they've written an awful book, and when I picked up Tom Hiney's review of my novel, The Romantic Movement (Books, 27 August), I thought of suicide. I felt Hiney had been a sloppy reader, but that sounded like sour grapes — I knew fiction reviews were subjective and therefore incontestable with a base- ball bat in a liberal democracy. At least Hiney had helpfully commented of my foolishness, 'None of this is criminal in itself.'
Then I got annoyed: Hiney had devoted most of his review to making factual com- plaints about my characters having no continuity, like in those movies where the sheriff has a parting to the right in one scene and to the left in the next. But the man had arrogantly not bothered to check his own facts before doing everything to dissuade readers from handing over £14.99. He had pointed out that my hero- ine, Alice, had been introduced to her new boyfriend by two different characters, current boyfriend Eric in one case, flat- mate Suzy in another. Unfortunately, he had been in such a hurry to finish the book, he hadn't noticed that the scene he quoted from p247 was in fact one between Alice and Suzy, not Alice and Eric. Then he was worried that the author had for- gotten that Suzy and Alice lived together, because another character had thought Suzy shared a flat with her boyfriend. Hiney seems the sort of critic who believes that if a character in a novel doesn't know who wrote Anna Karenina, then the author doesn't either. Thrilled to think the author was really in a big mud- dle, Hiney went on to explain triumphant- ly that 'Eric has no flatmate,' which was here about as relevant as telling us Ever- est is the world's tallest mountain.
Of course, none of this is criminal in itself, but I wouldn't mind if it was.
Alain de Bouon
Caroline Terrace, London SW1
Previous page
