Some of us at the Oxonian Review recently journeyed to London for jury duty on BBC 4’s The Big Read: Battle of the Books. Each week, the show pits two books against each other in a mock courtroom, with the honourable comic Sandi Toksvig presiding, while poet Ian McMillan and critic John Walsh each represent a book, calling various literary types as witnesses. A different reading group from across the UK serves as the jury for each episode, reaching a verdict on the basis of the ‘trial’. We Oxonian jurors had to decide between Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones’s Diary. I won’t spoil the ending for any loyal BBC 4 watchers, but I do want to criticise the show’s deeply misguided premise: that books can ‘battle’ or can be ‘judged’ in head-to-head competition.
Non-fiction author John McPhee notes that a writer’s voice is ‘like DNA, a snowflake, or a thumbprint; there are no two writers alike’. This resonates with our experience on The Big Read. As we heard the ‘cases’ in the BBC studio, it was clear that what stood between Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones’s Diary wasn’t just the centuries – the social norms and vocabulary changing over time. Nor was it simply that Jane Austen’s writing is ‘classic’ and Helen Fielding’s ‘popular’. For after all, the books have much in common. Fielding has claimed she based her book on Austen’s, and indeed both are gossipy, finely-wrought, and introspective investigations of courtship, marriage, and gender itself. But neither these similarities, nor their obvious differences, help define what is so unique about these works. The experiences of reading these books could hardly be judged against each other by any clear standard.
Such sentiments might be surprising from the staff of a book review. Isn’t judging books our business? Well, yes and no. In this issue, for example, Sara Galvan criticises Donna Tartt’s second book, last year’s The Little Friend, and in doing so she mentions a number of authors Tartt fails to measure up to. But Galvan’s point is that Tartt fails to establish a voice truly her own amidst the crowd of Southern writers, not that Faulkner or his peers stand victorious over a battlefield littered with failed challengers. A reader’s mind is a place where many voices can be heard, where coexistence of different sorts of perspectives, experiences, and reflections is possible.
That’s the point Jeffrey Kulkarni makes on page 12 when challenging Oxford lecturer Julian Johnson’s elitist musical polemic Who Needs Classical Music? Johnson fails to appreciate the range and diversity of music beyond the categories of ‘classical’ and ‘popular’, or ‘artistic’ and ‘(merely) entertaining’. A battle of Beethoven and Britney ultimately seems as incoherent as a battle of Austen and Fielding.
Perhaps, as Johnson argues, government subsidies for classical music are appropriate. But that decision should not be made because elitist cultural guardians deem it the ‘best’ sort of music to the exclusion of others. Quite the contrary. As Kulkarni points out, if we choose to support classical music, we do so because our pluralist society believe it crucial for promoting diversity and preserving our many histories.
Inevitably, we choose some books, albums, and public policies over others. But winner-take-all battle might not be the best method for making any of those choices.