Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

On Bad Reviews

I’ll admit I’m a big snotty-ass snot when it comes to reviewing books I don’t like—hell, I’m even snotty when I’m reviewing books I enjoy. What can I say? I have a surfeit of of this particular humor. Probably bile too. Or is it choler I’m thinking about? But this latest entry by Mrs. Giggles about reviews reminded me of some reviews I’ve read that have irritated me, not because—or at least not ONLY because—I disagreed with the number of stars they handed out, but mostly because the reviewers’ prejudices were made evident during the review and those prejudices just make my hair stand on end. Factual errors in reviews also bug me. Small ones can be credited to bad memory or honest mistakes, but when there are one or two big whoppers—GAH.

The examples I’m going to present are from Amazon.com, all reviews of The Ghost Road by Pat Barker, which is the last book of the Regeneration trilogy. Pat Barker is a woman writing about WWI (oh the horror, the horror, how dare she poach on such masculine territory) and all three books contain homosexual/bisexual characters, and apparently these factors together are enough to send some reviewers into a tizzy.

Excerpt number 1: “The ghost road is written by a woman who thinks she knows the details of a man’s life in WW1. (...) Overall, I didnt enjoy this book mainly because pat barker of all people wouldnt know about WW1 anymore than high school history students, and above all, a woman talking about male sexuality like she knows. And the grand daddy of them all…... air raids in London. LOL”

Ahhhh. I see. She should maybe stick to topics she would be more familiar with, like cooking, laundry and raising babies? And air raids did occur in London in WWI. They were conducted by none other than zeppelins (of the non-Led variety). From firstworldwar.com:

Throughout the remainder of 1915 the Zeppelins raided London frequently, and with impunity.  They flew too high for most planes, and when they were intercepted by aircraft the ammunition in use at the time had little effect. (...) The Zeppelin attacks had a profound psychological impact on the Allies.  The Germans were ordered, under the treaty of Versailles, to hand over all their airships, but their crews preferred to destroy as many of them as they could.

Even a silly little girl like me who did literally learn all she knew about WWI in high school history class remembered enough about this to look it up with no trouble. But maybe it’s because I’m a silly little girl who actually paid attention in class.

Excerpt number 2, from a review entitled “This book is an abomination”: “Near the end of the book I finally figured out what the point of the entire exercise is. There is one scene where a drunken soldier confides to Wilfred Owen that the horrible thing about the War is that it is depriving them of “Beethoven, Botticelli, beer and boys.” There it is in a nutshell. Pat Barker’s series conveys the strange sense that World War I was senseless because it upset a number of gay British poets and killed a fair number of their potential lovers.”

Yoicks. Think this guy might be homophobic? This book has a bisexual protagonist, and his homosexual encounters make up a very tiny percentage of the book—if I remember correctly, there are four very, very brief sex scenes in total, two hetero, two homo. Siegfried Sassoon is a secondary character in this novel, and as most of you probably know, he was gay as the day was long, but we don’t see him gettin’ down and dirty in the book. So I’m not sure which book this guy was reading, but it takes dedicated reading-between-the-lines to come up with the conclusion he did. Perhaps he should look into a career that involves playing records backwards while listening for Satanic messages? Or looking for pictures of the Virgin Mary in the burn-marks on grilled cheese sandwiches?

Panty-bunching Excerpt number 3: “What the heck does Pat Barker know about World War One? Only what she’s read in her ‘Eye Witness Picture Guide To The Great War.’ She knows nothing. Really nothing. She talks about ‘air raids’ in London!!!! This is the FIRST World War. (...) The cliches are unbearable: she’s writing from a man’s point of view and thinks that she’s the first one to discover the male sex-drive. The worst crud is when one iof the characters has these flashbacks to when he lived in an ‘African Village’. I live in Africa, Barker obviously doesn’t.”

First of all, as I already covered: Air raids DID happen in WWI. That these men are ignorant of this facet of the war while criticizing Barker for being dum female who dont no nuts about the Great War LOLOL is sweet, sweet irony indeed. Also, none of Barker’s characters even come close to Africa in her books; W.H. Rivers (a real-life character like Sassoon) spent significant time in Melanesia, specifically the Torres Straits islands, which lie between Australia and New Guinea. The flashbacks in the book take place there, not Africa. Different. Continents. Entirely. There are lots and lots of dark-skinned tribal peoples living in places other than Africa—whodathunkit?

So yeah, reviewers can oftentimes be wrong. Horribly wrong, in fact. Not us Smarty Bitchypoos, of course. Remember: we’re AWESOME.