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MASSEY is published by Massey University, Private Bag 11-222, Palmerston North, New Zealand

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MASSEY has a circulation of 75,000.

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Royce Royce the people’s choice

Author Peter Hawes reviews his reviewers

The dream of every writer fulfilled! I have been invited to review the reviews of my latest novel Royce Royce the people’s choice.

Alas, there is a snag, there is a worm in the paradisiacal core... The reviews were uniformly good. Not a snaggle-toothed curmudgeon amidst my critics to be put to the (s)word. How can you take issue with comment like this: “The book is a gem. Beautifully written, it is the best by far of Hawes’s works. It is actually hard to review objectively without coming across as a raving sycophant.” Heady stuff, and by no means unique in its opinion.

Amidst the general plaudits are the odd infelicities; a character I had dubbed Sticky rather unkindly becomes Stinky in one review and in another a 700 pound tuna balloons out to 700 tonnes. One can only wonder at the critical faculties of this critic as she envisages a railway train-sized critter on the end of a slim nylon line.

But overall, critical opinion concurred that I had written what dust jacket hacks call an ‘acclaimed’ novel. So, why can I expect to sell a couple of thousand copies when the Scottish writer of Cross Stitch has sold 50,000 books in New Zealand alone? My initial reaction to the news of Cross Stitch’s success was based upon some drastically erroneous assumptions: “Damnit!” I raved, “first I’m knocked off the best-seller list by Favourite Potato Recipes (entirely true, this was the fate of my first novel, Tasman’s Lay at the hands of Allison Holst’s latest... dare I say it?... pot-boiler) now I’m gazumped by a book of bloody knitting patterns!” I was then told – in a shout – by an outraged fan that it was actually about a heroine’s travels back in time to the troubled seventeenth century Highlands. So, why do 50,000 New Zealanders want to go back to antiquely unbonny auld Scotland? They certainly didn’t want to go back to olde New Zealand when I time-travelled to the days of Te Rauparaha in company with Napoleon. (Playing Waterloo – I’d always wanted to know who’d win if these two had gone to battle. Te Rauparaha, in case you want to know. A customary 2000 souls did, indeed, want to know.)

Are sales small because I’m a bloke, whereas our readers of novels are not? No, because Wilbur Smith’s flummery outsells the Scottish book two to one – and John Grisham’s drek doubles that.

Maybe re-scrutiny of my reviews will cast light. Ah, here we are: “Not for the humourless...” The H-word has been my literary bete-noir. My first novel, Tasman’s Lay was intentionally ‘straight’. I was subsequently told by many disappointed readers that all my jokes had fallen flat. Now, in Royce etc I am damned with humour – and 48,000 readers put the book back on the shelf. Not for the humourless.

Another review warns: “Don’t be misled by the beery bars and filthy fishing boats...” Aha, beerless pubs and clean fish boats are the secret to sales; they will certainly adorn my impending pages. The same review continues: “And as for the sexual antics, they might happen in cramped cabins or small cars, but never in a vacuum...” Right, vacuum sex it is, for my future (presumably short-lived) characters.

Wisdom, according to another critical extract, is of minority interest: “It (Royce etc) is a very wise insight into the struggles of... etc.” Right, wise insight sells mere thousands, it must be abandoned in my bid for hundreds of thousands.

And I have, to my cost, broken some rules: “Hawes has written a book that breaks with New Zealand’s tradition of introspective and slightly melancholy literature.” There we go again, we really do, it seems, want humourless books. So, subjective gloom will suffuse my next work, probably to be called Contemplating Sighs.

And I have been warned that “there’s also a fair amount of language that could offend and Rabelaisian romping”. Even worse: “A story about a boy who falls in love with a fish?” I don’t know if the word ‘piscinerast’ has yet entered the lingo, but it was obviously on the tips of several critical tongues.

To heed one’s critics is fatal – the result is the eternal conundrum; which came first, the chicken-out or the curate’s egg? I shall ignore even the lovely bits of Royce’s reviews, bolstered by the experience of Alun Coren who, when he was editor of Punch, studied literary themes for the secret of immediate success. He decided upon gardening, golf, animals and war and wrote a book called Golfing for Cats, with a cover photo of Hitler smelling a rose.
It bombed.