Reviewing is a craft; an art form in its own right. Sporting events aside, it is not practised much in New Zealand because venues are so limited. Certainly there is the short review – the ‘shrew’? – which has just enough room to provide a perfunctory, and often erratic, summary of the book or event. But that is very different from an engagement with the work. This is well illustrated by those excellent newspaper shrews of the NZSO, by John Button (Stuff) and William Dart (NZ Herald), but the extra space in the Middle C blog is an indication of limitations of brevity.

Space is even more important where the reviewer is engaging with a book. When in 1990, the Listener announced it was cutting back on its reviewing – it now mainly does a few shrews and author profiles – a group of enthusiasts established Peppercorn Press to publish the quarterly New Zealand Books, now New Zealand Review of Books: Pukapuka Aotearoa. (NZRB). Note the press’s name: its founders were realistic enough to know the job was not going to make a significant cash flow.

As it happens, I wrote the NZRB terms of reference, and I very much had in mind a local equivalent of the prestigious New York Review of Books and London Review of Books. I am only a very occasional contributor but in my opinion, it does not do too badly, although I regret that the usual review length is closer to 1000 words than the longer 2000 word plus of the overseas equivalents.

You can see the need for space by thinking about the reviewing needs of a couple of major books published this year to celebrate Colin McCahon’s hundredth birthday: the first volume of Peter Simpson’s Colin McCahon: There is Only One Direction, Vol. I 1919-1959 (the second volume covering the rest of his life will be published next year) and Justin Paton’s McCahon Country. I am not competent to judge the very different approaches they take – like Whitman, McCahon is large and contains multitudes, and he is as important internationally. But I do know a good review of the books will require at least 2000 words, and that I would follow it closely.

Except there is nowhere to publish such a review: NZRB has to end after 29 years of publication. Like every art platform it is dependent upon public funding and Creative New Zealand (CNZ) has just, without warning, ended its grant. There is, sadly, no alternative venue for such a review.

Why CNZ has done so is unclear; when they were asked they said they would supply an answer in 20 working days, which aficionados will recognise as the standard bureaucratic response under the Official Information Act, suggesting that CNZ either was totally unprepared or is treating the request as hostile.

You get the impression that CNZ may not be so much out of sympathy with serious reviewing as simply out of touch. Literature is the smallest sector of the CNZ interests, about double the chief executive’s salary.

The insensitivity of their bureaucratic response is nicely captured by Harry Rickets, long time editor of NZRB

CNZ to NZRB

"We simply 'declined your application';

we didn't cut off your grant.

After twenty-nine years - what an accusation!

We simply 'declined your application'.

Closing down: entirely your decision;

You can't blame us; you just can't.

We simply 'declined your application';

we didn't cut off your grant."

(I am reminded of R. A. K. Mason’s splendid Prelude’, which finishes by saying of a poem, ‘it can stab’.)

A quarterly periodical has production rhythms and a short-notice termination would be inevitably disruptive. Funding such an effort on an annual cycle as if it were a one-off project, is crazy, but should we expect administrative rationality from CNZ? Had they decided that serious reviewing was not something they wished to support (nor to also recognise the way that the NZRB reviews support literature – authors, publishers, booksellers – more generally) an organised approach would have been to give a warning now that the funding would be cut in the 2020 funding round: ‘let’s discuss’.

Why it should be unsympathetic to serious reviewing is unknown. The cynic might suggest the bureaucrats do not read. It cannot entirely be funding shortages. It is true that there has been no big injection of funding for literature, including to the authors’ fund, under this government – despite the ministers of arts being Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Minister of Finance Grant Robertson and Minister for Social Development Carmel Sepuloni. (There is an irony here, is there not, for each year there are the Prime Minister’s Awards in Literature? How can the judgement be made without quality reviews? Rely on the usual inbred official network?)

Even so, a small increase in productivity of the CNZ’s rather large bureaucracy would have funded NZRB and more besides. For every $100 CNZ grants to the arts it spends another $28 on operating costs. For instance, the cost of the annual report which CNZ produces would easily cost more than NZRB – and it is much less readable. (If the productivity gains involved some layoffs, the offset would be more employment in the creative arts).

It is possible that CNZ wants the journal to shift to digital but that misunderstands the nature of the format. Digital may work fine for shrews but is hopeless for longer articles. (Is this another indication that CNZ is out of touch with what it is administering?) NZRB is on the web, but most readers use the hardcopy, for good reason.

The limitations of soft-copy reviewing are well-illustrated by publicly funded Radio New Zealand which does a brilliant job of audio reviewing arts, books, music and performance. As much as we value them, however, how often do we go back to the recorded broadcast to reflect? (It a pity that RNZ does not have an (audio) reviews section on its website.)

I wondered whether reviews of some literature forms could be confined the shrews: poetry for instance. And then I thought of the magnificent production of Simply by Sailing in a New Direction. Allen Curnow: A Biography – he is a literary equivalent of McCahon – which is a kind of review and twice as long as the anthology of his collected poems.

The principal author of the biography was Terry Sturm, who was the last chair of the independent Literary Fund Advisory Committee. He fought against its merging into CNZ because he thought the bureaucracy would be unsympathetic to literature. The takeover seems to have been because of bureaucratic demands, rather than any attention to the creative issues involved; Terry said the bureaucrats lived in ‘Villaintown’. The withdrawal of public funding for the New Zealand Review of Books and the consequent closure of the publication and serious reviewing is exactly the sort of thing he foresaw.

PS. I had set aside this week’s column to do some Christmas reflections on some of this year’s New Zealand books which deserved more coverage. Apologies; we are going to have to rely on shrews.