Everyone knows writing a book is hard, even if they’ve never done it. It’s so inherently daunting a task to self-impose that some people never bother to start, and a lot of people can’t seem to finish.
This week I re-read A Great Deliverance by Elizabeth George. Obviously I liked it enough the first time around to feverishly hunt down every subsequent book and cart all of them with me through multiple moves, but I was still surprised by how deliciously, terrifyingly absorbing it is. It’s deeply intimidating to a brand new author to read something so good. It was an act of pure hubris to close the book and open my word processor to keep hacking away at my own ridiculous story.
So I took the advice of another author and looked up A Great Deliverance on Goodreads. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t 4.04/5 stars! Amazon shows 4.4/5. Not bad. But 3.79/5 on LibraryThing, and on the Bookbag, 3.5/5. Granted I’d never heard of those last two before I started looking for more ratings, but those are some dismal numbers.
How can anyone say of this engrossing, sexy, seminal work of art that, “sometimes the first outing is not the best whilst an author is establishing characters but I am really not sure I can bear to try another unless the author has been given a sound talking-to and promised to reform” (to quote one miserable jackass on Goodreads)?
It’s fucking depressing, of course, that something so good can be found faulty by the army of joyless, soulless robo-readers out there; but it’s also perversely encouraging. If even Elizabeth George can be misunderstood and maligned, then there’s no point in worrying about what people have to say… about anything.
So I’m carrying on with the next book, Payment in Blood, trying and failing not to internalize the Brit-speak, and choosing to take comfort from the fact that I’ll probably never be so good; but even if I could equal or surpass her, I could still be accused of “useless, mind-numbingly boring navel-gazing,” the “fascinating character development of a basket of sock puppets” (okay that’s hilarious), or being fit only for “the ‘donate’ box for our local charity shop.”
I added my own five-star rating and went back about my business.
– AK