Geordie Williamson - critic of the year

CONGRATULATIONS to my friend and colleague (and that is the order in which I think of him) Geordie Williamson.

Geordie Williamson

CONGRATULATIONS to my friend and colleague (and that is the order in which I think of him) Geordie Williamson, who at the Sydney Writers Festival tonight will be named the winner of the Pascall Prize for critical writing. To put that in headline terms, this newspaper's chief literary critic is the critic of the year.

I read and admired Geordie long before I met him. Funnily enough, given the debate about the under-representation of women in Australian literature, I thought he was a she. I don't know why; perhaps it was one of those brain blocks where I consistently misread his byline as Georgie. Anyway, once we met the question was put beyond dispute. Oh, and I thought he was a brilliant critic even before he outed himself as a man.

As a bloke, he's a good one. I won't overdo the man hugs here, except to place on the record Geordie's generous offer to give my two hens, Nugget and Worm, a retirement home on his semi-rural property when the time comes. (Who knew they lay for only three or four years?)

As a critic, Geordie is a gentleman. I've never seen him in a tweed coat, but he'd look good in one. He is without pretension, as evidenced by the clarity of his prose, his reluctance with the perpendicular pronoun and his fondness for "truck stop" grappa. He is guided by a passion for literature and its ability to illuminate the human condition, and it is this he wants to share with readers. He's unapologetically for books and writers and writing, and that puts us on the same side.

He's not a literary hit man, he doesn't shout about how bad a book is. And that means when he does say something is not up to scratch, you pay attention, as when he described Ian McEwan's 2010 novel Solar as "An odd, desultory production, by turns pompous and feebly comic". Yet he also saw beyond the bad book in front of him, to something mitigating and thought-provoking: "The failure . . . points to broader limitations the novel displays when faced with climate change. A form dedicated to the human, the social, can only gesture towards a world in which the human and the social cease to exist . . . what we need most is form that can describe the sounds that will come after we have fallen silent."

I'd argue that the novel can do that. Cormac McCarthy's The Road, to take one recent example, does imagine those sounds, to the terror of our ears, and our souls. But I wouldn't have had that thought without Geordie's prompting, and that trademark questing, inclusive intelligence is why he is an indispensable critic in an age where the dispensable proliferates.

I KNEW about Geordie's win in advance, so was able to mention it today. But at the time of writing the Sydney Writers Festival was yet to start, so I'll have to wait until next week to share some thoughts about how it all went.

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