Yes, the Booker winner is brutish - and yes, Medea did have to murder her children

Those who inveigh against gratuitous sex and violence inveigh against literature itself

Author Marlon James winning author of "A Brief History of Seven Killings", poses with his award at the ceremony for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2015 at The Guildhall in London

It’s intellectual silly season again. Book-baiting time. Minds regularly start softening around this time of the year, post-Man Booker Prize. You know the stuff. Why can’t we give prizes to upbeat novels that skip along and you can finish while watching Strictly? Novels with no hard words. Characters you can identify with. Plots you can follow.

This year, the mulish inanity kicked in even earlier with reappraisals of the work of the late Jackie Collins. We don’t traduce the recently dead in this column, but even allowing for a proper period of respect, it surely wasn’t necessary to hail her novels as repositories of erotic wisdom – so many shades of grey before their time – or to cite the number of copies sold as proof of her enduring quality, a rebuke to writers who have literary pretensions and sell bubkes. You think you can write? Then show me your royalty cheque.

It would be nice if we could all agree to this proposition: popularity is not the same as achievement. I won’t go so far as to say that novels sell in inverse proportion to their worth, for just occasionally someone like Dickens or George Eliot comes along to prove the opposite. That, though, was long ago, feels like another country, and besides the wench is dead. In our time, the novelist is not expected to be oracle nor – in the Dickensian sense – entertainer. We expect less and don’t have the time to concentrate that hard anyway. Reading as a grand educative tussle remains a passion for the few, but to get the many to engage with a novel that isn’t just a tapestry of tweets requires some external intervention such as a collision of the planets, a major power cut or a literary prize.

Hence the Man Booker, whose judges don’t pretend to represent the man on the Clapham Omnibus, though the latter continues to protest the virtues of a “good read”, as witness an attack on this year’s winner, Marlon James, by one Laura Freeman writing in the Daily Mail. “It is a horrible book,” she writes – a phrase sufficient in itself to get me interested. “It is unrelentingly nasty, brutish” and, of course – you can see the Hobbesian joke coming a mile away – not short enough. But invoking that hard-nosed philosopher, even silently, is a bit of an own goal if you are arguing for a rosy view of human existence, and want reading to be a “pleasurable” experience crowned with “a happy ending”.

Would Laura Freeman have a novelist lie to spare her stomach? “After the first 100 pages,” she goes on, “I had to put the book down” – that’s another recommendation for me, the best books being those you have periodically to rest from and ponder – but she only sets A Brief History of Seven Killings aside in order to “go outside and get some air” because “she felt depressed and sullied”. Not since Carmen Callil said reading Philip Roth was like having him sit on her face have I encountered so disarmingly frank an admission.

Of the thousands of ripostes we could make to the visceral daintiness expressed by Sullied of Sutton Coldfield, or Suffocated of Shepherd’s Bush, let’s proffer just two. First, the unpleasantness about which she complains has always inhered to serious writing as surely as a bonk inheres to Jackie Collins. Did Medea have to murder her children? Couldn’t Regan’s husband have plucked out just one of Gloucester’s eyes? Those who inveigh against gratuitous sex and violence inveigh against literature itself. Literature is necessarily gratuitous. No one makes us do it.

Second, when a reader describes feeling queasy she has to be certain to distinguish between the book and her own weakness of constitution. It is no judgement of a thing outside yourself to say it makes you ill. The wise reader knows that every pronouncement is to some degree an act of self-exposure; the book you find too challenging might only show how ill-equipped you are to face its challenge.

Which brings us to Amazon in whose review pages, to borrow a jaundiced sentence from Dickens, the noisy and the eager and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fret and chafe and make their usual uproar. But stop! – the times they are a changin’. Amazon is now to prosecute those who write fake reviews of products they have never used and books they have never read. The days of dispensing paltry praise for pence, Amazon promises, are over. There’s something Goyaesque about this decision. It puts one in mind of Saturn devouring his children. Believing his offspring were plotting his downfall, Saturn made the wise decision to eat them first. Desperate times, desperate measures. But in getting rid of phoney panegyrists, Amazon is dealing with only half the problem. Now I want to hear it will be going after those who review adversely, not for material profit but – which is far worse – in answer to the promptings of uneducated vanity.

If the great thing about the internet is that it throws wide the doors of discussion to everyone, the bad thing about the internet is that it throws wide the doors of discussion to everyone. Democracy, as we now understand it, holds that we all have a right to an opinion and every opinion has validity. But an opinion is to judgement what ignorance is to knowledge. On a hill higher even than that on which truth is enthroned sits aesthetic judgement, and he that will reach it must enter a terrain that is both foreign and inimical, must jettison that contingent thing which is himself, must not look to agree before he likes (because you can no more agree or disagree with a novel than you can a flower), must grasp that art does not state its meaning but finds it, must know when to confess that the faults he discerns in a book are just possibly his own, and must accept that “knob” is not a literary term. Only then is he ready to begin reporting on what he reads.