Tonight in London, the founders of the Omnivore review-aggregating website will announce the winner of the second annual Hatchet Job of the Year award. This rewards “the writer of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months”. Last year’s winner was Adam Mars-Jones, who was presented with the golden hatchet and a year’s supply of potted shrimp (courtesy of the Fish Society) for his review of Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall.
The runner-up last year was the New Statesman‘s lead fiction reviewer, Leo Robson, who earned an honourable mention for his review of Richard Bradford’s biography of Martin Amis. We’re delighted that another NS contributor has made the shortlist chosen this year by judges Lynn Barber, Francis Wheen and John Walsh. Richard J Evans’s merciless review of Hitler: A Short Biography by A N Wilson is one of eight shortlisted reviews. Here’s a representative sample:
As writers of historical fiction do, he read a handful of English-language biographies and histories for his novel (he doesn’t appear to understand German) but he has added little or no further reading for this biography. What might do as background research for a novel won’t do as preparation for a serious work of history. Nor does he seem to have thought very hard or taken much care over what little reading he has done. It would take more space than is available here to list all the mistakes in the book. Most obvious are the simple factual errors … Novelists (notably Mann) and literary scholars (such as J P Stern) have sometimes managed to use a novel angle of approach to say something new and provocative about Hitler, the Nazis and the German people. However, there is no evidence of that here, neither in the stale, unoriginal material, nor in the banal and cliché-ridden historical judgements, nor in the lame, tired narrative style; just evidence of the repellent arrogance of a man who thinks that because he’s a celebrated novelist, he can write a book about Hitler that people should read, even though he’s put very little work into writing it and even less thought.
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