I’d half-expected this debate on Monday March 31st to be a blood-spattered fight, with bloggers Lynne Hatwell and Mark Thwaite – of dovegreyreader:typepad.com and ReadySteadyBook.com – jeering mercilessly at the dead-tree professors of English Literature, John Carey and John Mullan. Wrong. John Carey, chief critic of the Sunday Times and an anti-elitist to the very marrow of his bones, evidently thought both bloggers were fascinating – and they responded by, well, being fascinating.

Mark Thwaite, who used to work for Amazon.com, confessed he’d started his blog because he’d got into the habit of getting free review copies. ReadySteadyBook now gets between 5,000 and 10,000 hits a day and is considered, by publishers and readers alike, to be one of the best places on the web for clever, wise, sparky book-related discussions and reviews.

Lynne, a health visitor who lives in the wilds of the west of England, started blogging because she wanted to share her lifelong passion for reading. She doesn’t offer literary criticism, nor reviews, but a conversation about books: “how a book affected me, what makes it special.” What she brings to the book blogosphere is not the professionalism of the literary critic, or even of the reviewer, but something less detached, something she calls “camouflaged autobiography” – a phrase cribbed from John Carey.

Without actually attacking the cosiness of the literary establishment, she was marvellously and modestly subversive, fantasising about being taken out to dinner by Ian McEwan at the Ivy the night before she was due to write about his latest book. Would she “the Mrs Merton of the lit blog world” keep this to herself?

Most certainly not: her readers would immediately learn what he was wearing, who else was there, what they ate…oh, and something about the book. I wonder how many reviewers in the audience bowed their heads in silent shame on hearing this?

Luckily for my bloodlust, John Mullan did insist that ‘real’ literary criticism – of the sort he teaches at the University of London and the sort he writes – is somehow ‘better’ and more significant than the opinions scattered throughout the blogosphere. Blogging, he said, has some real ‘vices’: it’s often ignorant, abusive, deceptive… the list goes on. Where in the blogosphere is a literary critic as great as, say, Christopher Ricks, to be found? (Ricks being, as both Johns agreed, the greatest living critic of our age). The last word had to go to Mark Thwaite: the next Ricks, he said, will be found on-line. I had the sneaking suspicion that he hopes he might be found somewhere near ReadySteadyBook. What’s more, he could be right.

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