Critical soul-searching confirms where a critic's loyalties lie

Fay Weldon. Photo / Jane Ussher

It's easy to recall the moments in my life when I've been so overwhelmed by sudden shame and remorse that I've prayed for a meteorite to smite me on the spot. One occurred this summer at the Curious Art Festival at Hampshire's Pylewell Park.

I greeted a friend who gesticulated to the table behind him, saying, "You must know Fay Weldon".

Yes, yes, I know - by daunting reputation - the celebrated writer and feminist icon. You could even say she's welded on my brain, because I once gave a complete stinker of a review to an erotic novel written under a pseudonym; only to be told later that the author was almost certainly Weldon. By then I'd dismissed the book as "fearful tosh". I am generally a big fan of Weldon's oeuvre. However, my first duty as a reviewer was to the reader, and I wasn't sure they'd be well advised to allocate hard-earned cash to a pseudo-Dennis Wheatley sex romp.

So the review ran in its unflattering entirety, pointing me inexorably to the day when I would stand quaking before Weldon, wondering whether it was best to apologise or hope merciful amnesia had drawn a veil over the episode. But long experience tells me that praise, however extravagant, will be absorbed or taken as talent's due while criticism, however trivial, will remain engraved on the artiste's heart. So I grovelled and blushed and the leonine Weldon was magnanimity personified.

It doesn't always turn out so well, by any means. Alain de Botton once responded to a poor review by Caleb Rain in the New York Times by posting underneath the critic's blog: "I will hate you 'til the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make."

However, I think critics will agree the victims of their art who react with heartfelt anguish are the ones that linger longest in your guilt-gut - like the headmaster who tells you, "I'm not angry, just disappointed". So, by gum, do I feel for my colleague Robbie Collin whose one-star review of The Unbeatables provoked the following howl of pain from the movie's writer, Richard O. Smith, in a letter to the Daily Telegraph: "I invested my heart and soul in the film, neglecting my marriage and missing my mother's final birthday to create something honest, funny and engaging for cinema-goers."

If Collin is anything like as thin-skinned as I am, he'll be cowering behind a potted fern, gibbering with remorse.

He'll be wondering what Hardyesque torment the cruel universe will visit upon him for forgetting that this film represents many years' hard toil to its creator.

One thing all critics know: you can't take it back.