Everyone’s a critic – Alison Healy on one-star book reviews

Do you ever suspect that some of the facts of the day on those desk calendars are made up? I imagine someone in an office saying: “Quick, we have no fact for April 22nd, give me one”, and a colleague suggesting: “Just say the person who invented the question mark was born on this day in 1540.”

I began to have my doubts about the veracity of the facts when I flipped over our own calendar last month and saw the claim that, when the M6 toll road in Birmingham was built in 2003, it was lined with 2.5 million pulped Mills & Boon novels.

But my suspicions were ill-founded, and it appears that the road to true love does run very smoothly indeed in Birmingham, thanks to the unwanted copies of the romantic novels.

Apparently, the books were pulped at a recycling firm in south Wales and used to hold the Tarmac and asphalt in place and act as a sound absorber.

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One online BBC article quoted project manager Richard Beal saying Mills & Boon books were used "not as a statement about what we think of the writing, but because it is so absorbent. They may be slushy to many people, but it's their 'no-slushiness' that is their attraction as far as we are concerned."

Some 45,000 books were needed for every mile of motorway.

Books by other publishers were also used but no authors were name-checked in the article, which was just as well. What author wants to hear that thousands of copies of the book they slaved away on for years had been pulped and buried under the road? It’s almost worse than finding your book in the bargain bin with a 99-cent sticker on it.

But if an author wants to feel really bad about their work, they just need to click onto the reviews section on the Goodreads, or Amazon websites.

There will always be a disgruntled reader giving a one-star review for the most ridiculous of reasons.

I’m thinking of the person who bought the screenplay for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald and then gave it one star because they thought they were buying a novel “and who would buy a stupid screenplay?”

I doubt the one-star review dented JK Rowling’s confidence but perhaps it’s just as well that some writers are not alive to read what some modern readers think of their work.

When James Joyce was finishing Ulysses in his Parisian apartment, he might have been demoralised had he known that, more than a century later, the book would garner almost 10,000 one-star reviews from readers on the Goodreads website.

What would Joyce have made of Chad, who advised people to throttle anyone with a stick if they described Ulysses as marvellous? Chad went on to say that Irish people had a great sense of humour but sometimes they just go too far "like with the IRA and this book". He didn't expand on his inexplicable decision to link the IRA with our sense of humour.

Feline lover Gary said it was the “worst book I have ever read; only redeeming quality is there was a cat”.

And Dan loftily proclaimed that good books should participate in a conversation with the reader. “I made the mistake of inviting Joyce – via Ulysses – to join my literary conversation. He’s not much of a conversationalist. He mostly just sat in a corner mumbling incoherently to himself”.

If you feel bad for Joyce, you'll feel worse for Anne Frank. When she was writing about her darkest fears as she hid in that attic in Amsterdam during the second World War, she hoped her work would be published someday. But could she ever have thought that an American called Alex would read her diary almost 80 years later and complain that there wasn't enough about the Holocaust? He moaned that it only depicted the boredom of living in an attic. Did he expect her to risk her life and leave the attic so that he could have a better mental picture of the Nazis dragging people from the streets?

But Alex put the final nail in the coffin of his literary credentials when he confidently declared: “In the pantheon of literature about being locked in an attic, Flowers in the Attic is still the gold standard”.

Nor were Samuel Beckett’s metaphysical musings immune from harsh criticism. One reader on Amazon described Waiting for Godot as gobbledygook, saying “I don’t know what Beckett was smoking when he wrote it, and I don’t know what the reviewers were smoking when they rated it, but it wasn’t cigarettes”.

But let’s leave the last word to a reader who called himself Alphakid42. In his review of Waiting for Godot, he said that he would prefer to undergo open-heart surgery with no anaesthetic than to endure the play in any form again. “It’s that bad. No, it’s worse.”

It’s safe to assume that Beckett wouldn’t have cared about Aphakid42’s literary criticism. He would probably have taken a sip of his double espresso and declared: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on. And at least my books aren’t being pulped to make a road in Birmingham.”