Literatuur Zonder Leeftijd. Jaargang 7

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Views on reviews: a patchwork.
Nancy Chambers^⋆⋆

First Pattern

This from my letter to Fran Kelly, member of the committee organizing the Views on Reviews Conference, written in November 1992:

‘We look at the business of reviewing from just about every angle except the book's. We think about what librarians need, what teachers need, what kids need, what publishers should or should not provide. All these groups have their own specialinterest lobbies, and quite right too. But who looks after The Book?

What does The Book need to survive and thrive? We seem to think that, as concept and cultural object, it can take care of itself and, in the public printed response to it, eternally rise above

-	insensitive readings
-	inexperienced reviewers
-	ineffective writing
-	inconsistent approaches

With children's books particularly we seem to think that anyone, but anyone can do it and that all judgements (within, say,

⋆⋆ Pieces covering her keynote presentation, ‘Challenging Orthodoxy: What Books Need’, Views on Reviews Conference, South Australia Writers' Centre, Adelaide, May 7-8, 1993.

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one periodical) have equal validity. We seem to think that having opinions is the same as having a philosophy.

What I'm going to do is look at reviewing (and other forms of thinking-in-print) from the standpoint of The Book’.

This seems a perfectly good skein from which any number of illustrated sermonettes may be spun and orthodoxies challenged. I plan to patch in some participial propositions under the heading:

Being grown-up about children's books

-	paying attention (what reviewing is);
-	making distinctions (what criticism is);
-	making allowances (what children's book people do too much of).

I must make clear that I am talking about vocational reviewing (the kind I know about: specialist-journal), not press (the kind I read: general-public).

Second Pattern

Then I receive from Fran a copy of an article by Jenny Pausacker about her own first steps in reviewing and how her approach has developed through contact with other writers.

‘... All of a sudden I had access to a whole range of discussions where people in the field were articulating their dissatisfaction with the nature and quality of children's book reviewing. Practical alternatives were suggested, debated, refined and exchanged with groups in other states ...’. (Australian Women's Book Review, 1 March 1993)

I read Jenny's article several times and am frozen with excitement: somewhere on this planet, it seems, there are

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readers/writers who not only understand how important reviewing should be (they have, after all, arranged a two-day conference about it), but have already ‘debated, refined and exchanged’ views on the subject. Surely part of the Views on Reviews Conference will concentrate on these exchanged, debated, and refinements.

Confidence in my skein of sermonettes wanes. In my mind Australia becomes transformed into the promised land of bookliness. Perhaps now is the time and this the audience on which to try out my version of What Makes the Children's Books World Different from the Adult Book World, and Why the Difference Matters. Hints of this have already been signalled in a February fax to Diane Browne, S.A. Writers Centre, who needs a quote from me to put in a press release. I give her four to pick from.

1.	Any group of specialists will be limited as reviewers of children's books: teachers are bound by the classroom; librarians are bound by the collection; booksellers are bound by the customer; academics are bound by convention; parents are bound by their offspring. But the limitations begin as strengths - the experience and expertise in each of these groups is indispensable - and can become strengths again, if they are combined creatively.’
2.	The variety of constituencies involved in reviewing - teachers, librarians, parents, children, booksellers, academics, journalists, novelists, artists - is one of the most notable and least exploited aspects of the children's book world.’
3.	Thinking carefully about the writing and publishing of reviews is more crucial than ever, it seems to me. The happy anarchy of I-know-what-I-(or the kids)-like leads to a winsome flabbiness that affects the books themselves and, ultimately, the adults' desire to keep on reading them.’

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4.	Reviewing isn't like bike riding, where once you've learned how, you can do it right every time. Both principles and practice need constant reassessing and refining: for The Book, nothing should be too much trouble.’

Third Pattern

Before I get to the book-world patches, I need to fill in where they come from. My life in publishing has been devoted to the preparation for print of writing about children's books and reading. For thirty years, therefore, reviewing has been a preoccupation.

The Horn Book. The most venerable, venerated periodical in the field; very select reviewing panel, public-librarian emphasis. As the editor's assistant, I copy-edit all reviews and articles. The verdict of each review has the force of plenary inspiration, so far as I'm concerned; I question only mundane matters of syntax and word usage. It seems to me an honour to be associated with such carefully tended, beautifully produced writing.

In 1965 I move to London, work for a children's publisher for a while, then am offered the editorship of a new bookshop-based review, called Children's Book News. A very modest production; too many reviewers, a wide range of book experience. As both instigator and enabler, this time, I look at the writing from a less deferential angle. I trim away what I can of the empty and verbose, and cherish the fluent and thoughtful, but even with the most experienced, readable reviewers I gradually realize (how worrying that it's taken so long) that there is no such thing as objectivity or a single correct verdict. I feel that a running-head should appear on each page, remember: every review is only one person's opinion. I worry about the differing levels of experience and expertise in the reviewing panel.

In 1968 I marry Aidan Chambers, whom I have met after asking him to review for Children's Book News. In 1969 we set up The

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Thimble Press in order to publish Signal, a journal we hope will encourage critical writing about children's books. I know, however, that acceptable literary critical writing is rare and that there are many other corners of interest in the children's book meadow. Signal will, therefore, be open to anyone writing thoughtfully about any aspect of the field.

Over the years Signal has included everything from historical studies to personal memoirs, from detailed aesthetic close looking at picture books to accounts of classroom practice. Since Signal gives an annual poetry award, at least once a year there are articles about poetry for children. (We don't take advertising, so all our pages are devoted to articles.)

Not only is there variety of subject matter, but Signal also represents different kinds of written discourse. Publishing articles by classroom teachers and university lecturers and specialist booksellers and children's librarians and literary novelists and translators and independent scholars and critics and commentators is implicit evidence of the extraordinary potential for communication among adults that children's books offer.

Out of Signal have grown separate publications, whose circulation far exceeds their parent's. The Signal Bookguides, devoted to specific subjects, are a particular kind of reviewing. In Signal itself I try different approaches to reviewing new books, usually involving more than one person writing about the same book, sometimes as a correspondence where differences can be aired and examined. (I am currently proposing the idea that a whole educational/literary programme could be grown out of a thoughtful formulation of the principles and practice of effective reviewing. I'd be glad to hear from anyone who has actually done this; my address: Thimble Press, Lockwood, Station Road, South Woodchester, Stroud, Glos. U.K. GL5 5EQ.)

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Fourth Pattern

In 1982, having retrospected Thimble Press's first decade for a conference paper in 1981, and hoping that a few generalizations might provoke some helpful reader reaction, I write in Signal (slightly edited here):

The possibility of achieving universal literateness - that is, being at ease with language in print - exists only in the world of children's books. To put it another way: Because all the human factors in the production and exploitation of children's books are closer together than in other areas of cultural life, there is a unique possibility of finding out how to link the majority of the population into the chance to love literature.

This confidence will sound very familiar: for years we have heard and agreed with speakers and writers on children's books about the over-riding and fundamental importance of literature in young lives. The usual claims about that importance are, however, different from the one I am making. Mine is a social - even bureaucratic - point whereas the more common observations have to do with personal development.

Perhaps I can make this clearer by sketching in what seems to me to constitute the world of children's books. The first thing about the children's book world is that it does not include children - just as the book world in general does not encompass the audience from its products. (As example, David Malouf, his agent, his publisher, the seller of his books, his reviewers, his hosts at literary luncheons, are all part of a demonstrable book world, while most of his readers are demonstrably not.) For the moment, therefore, children are off-stage.

In my entirely personal scheme of things the centre stage of the children's book world belongs to the Generators - the writers and artists, the editors and publishers. Close around this centre are the Propagators and Distributors: reviewers, media people (radio, television, newspapers), literary and publicity agents,

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booksellers, and in at least one aspect of their role, public librarians.

So far, so like the adult book world. People from any or all of these professions and jobs might be expected to intermingle, to influence one another, to have some effect on the book - if not on its creation, then certainly on its reception. But with children's books there are other elements, more factors. I think of these additional presences as the Intensifiers. To me they are primary and secondary school teachers, the school librarians and public children's librarians, and the parents. It is their constant - and emotional - contact with the audience that makes their role in our book world unique. And it is their prominence that makes the children's book world different from the adult book world.

To say it another way: No equivalent groups of people figure in - have influence in - the literary world outside children's books. This seems to me to be profoundly significant, even revolutionary.

One of the reasons that literature - all the arts, in fact - means so little to so many is what I can only call the sociology (the bureaucracy) of culture. Very simplistically expressed: there is a class, an involuntary elite, who know and do and discriminate, and the rest of the population whose lack of opportunity has removed the chance to participate in the art that has gone before and the art that is happening now. This particular manifestation of the sociology of culture is reinforced, if not created, by the various specialisms involved in book-making before the point where the book meets its audience. Obviously we can't do without the specialists - the generators, the propagators, the distributors. And, admittedly, countless people have led a life of the mind enhanced by books unaided by a widespread and selfconscious intensifying presence. Such people will always be able to find what they want in the way of cultural experience. And if they don't want it, they have the choice of ignoring or abandoning it. But now, in children's books, there is an effective, relatively recent arrival in the bureaucracy which by its nature opens up

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ways that the whole bureaucracy may be manipulated so that its treasures are more widely spread and appreciated.

In my over-simplified categorizing of the children's book world, I have not yet mentioned the critics and the academics, although critics could be included with the reviewing group as propagators. (Critics and academics do not go together in any absolute way, although some children's book critics do operate in institutions of higher learning.) I haven't mentioned critics and academics before because they did not, at first, seem to fit in the line from creator to audience. In the adult book world the Distinction-Makers (such would be a good design for critics, I think) are dispensable or not, depending on one's own personal willingness to engage in abstractions. But it now seems to me that in the children's book world the Distinction-Makers are potentially indispensable: it is they who could provide the maps by which the other parts of our worlds might meet each other in more than a conversational way. The result might provide the key to what I have rather lamely called universal literateness.

So far, I feel, many of the Distinction-Makers are confined in an enclave equivalent to the one occupied by their counterparts in the adult book world. But before we non-academics start feeling superior about that, let's admit that other enclaves exist within children's books, other areas where what we know and are doing seems vastly more important than anything people elsewhere in our world know and do. So the will to explore possibilities has come from all sides.

... Of course, ‘getting together’ isn't enough: information can be exchanged on such occasions, but increases in knowledge and changes in attitudes and expectations only really happen after individuals have worked things out for themselves ... If progress is ever made, it will be because a number of individuals have made conscious and continuing efforts to listen to and understand and act on knowledge gleaned from areas of interest other than their own. Perhaps some bit of that knowledge will come from the juxtaposition of the several approaches to children's books that make up Signal.’

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In 1993 I'd say things differently, and I would certainly want to alter the point about children not being part of the children's book world. The nature of children's responses to their reading has become central to adult discussion of their books, so children are central too. And I have shortened the point about academics. Now I simply say ‘Academics are paid to think’, and we shouldn't be shy of asking them to help us: by formulating questions, by making connections, by compiling ‘courteous translations’ of ideas we might not be able to handle, cold, on our own.

Fifth Pattern

So here are these several constituencies, interlocked by their concern with children's books - and what activity is shared by them all?

- Reviewing -

Improve reviewing and, potentially, you increase and improve the meeting points among books and children and adults.

Any group of people will have their own set of observations on how reviews might be improved. Mine include:

-	get the writing right (reviews should delight as well as inform; forbid cliches and wordiness and ignorance);
-	decide where the children fit (for a review it's not what children say about books that's important but what the adult makes of what they say);
-	pick book buyers as reviewers (if a person doesn't value books enough to spend her own money on them, why should we listen to what she thinks about them?);

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-	work out a consistent stance in relation to the publishing industry (is reviewing an arm of the industry or does it serve some autonomous purpose?);
-	emphasize variety, the hallmark of literature: both in selecting which books to review and in deciding how to write about them.

To my mind, every effective review helps to repay the lifelong debt that readers owe The Book - so there is a sense in which reviewers act on behalf of all readers.

This thought, which may be too fanciful, pushes me to the edges of my keynote patchwork. Now comes the hard part: finding the needle, the thread and the people who are really good at sewing .....