Spiked: George Orwell, at least, had sufficient standing to get an apology for a killed piece

So, Sir Howard Davies used his Man Booker speech to denounce book reviewers for log-rolling and the overpraising of mediocre fiction. He contrasts this with the clear-minded judgment of himself and his colleagues on the judging panel.

The only unusual thing about this denunciation is that ... is that ... well, I can't see anything unusual about it at all. Not only does it conform to the standard formula by which book reviewers are attacked, it comes at just the right time of year (the Man Booker prize ceremony). It also displays its own bad faith, blinkered vision and self-puffery masquerading as honesty - if I may use the vocabulary of my trade to pass a verdict on Davies' comments.

I am going to apply it to my own case, for that is the one I know best.

I have been reviewing books professionally for about 20 years now. Like all book reviewers, I have George Orwell's "Confessions of a Book Reviewer" tattooed to the inside of my eyeballs, and can quote large chunks of it verbatim:

"All the stale old phrases - 'a book that no one should miss', 'something memorable on every page', 'of special value are the chapters dealing with, etc etc' - will jump into their places like iron filings obeying the magnet, and the review will end up at exactly the right length and with just about three minutes to go."

Or this one:

"The prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash - though it does involve that, as I will show in a moment - but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever."

This is what hovers behind every attack on the book reviewer's trade. However, it simply isn't like that any more. There are fewer book reviews, which is terrible, but those that there are, are better treated, and imperil their "immortal souls" far less, than Orwell's put-upon hack.

As for what I think about my job: I love it. This is because I am in the extremely fortunate position of having a column for the Guardian, in which I alone get to choose the books I write about, and I choose them because I like them, and not because they are deemed "important", or are in some way newsworthy.

I have one strict rule: I don't review books by friends.

Book reviewers and authors do mix, you see; often book reviewers become authors. And vice versa. There is a permeable membrane between the two professions. Now, as it turns out, I am not convinced that authors have as much to commend themselves when it comes to the matter of friendship as, say, estate agents, or directors of human resources. They are self-obsessed solipsists who spend massive amounts of time locked away in their studies. That is, if they are any good. Their social skills tend to atrophy. So, the problem of not reviewing books by friends of mine who are writers is not too big a problem. For those who love schmoozing, it is, and they should get their house in order.

But, on the whole, it isn't nearly as big a problem as Sir Howard (the "Sir", incidentally, is for the glorified counting of beans, and is the product of a system that undergoes far less hostile scrutiny than that of the book critic) says it is. He probably took one look at all the monkey-suited guests at the tables in front of him and imagined he saw a large, self-congratulating clique. It is not necessarily so.

I remember I once was asked to review a novel by a very eminent man of letters. The snag was: his wife was the deputy literary editor of the paper. The actual literary editor, a man of some tact but possibly with a mischievous streak, told me: "excessive praise or excessive blame would be inappropriate." Well, what to do?

In the end, I reviewed the book honestly: good in parts, didn't work overall, do better next time. In due course, the deputy literary editor became the literary editor and the commissions from the paper suddenly, but unsurprisingly, ceased. Yet the eminent man of letters has indeed done better since then; although, curiously enough, the novel I reviewed does not feature on the list of previous works that precedes his latest novel.

My point is: with a small amount of honesty, the system works; and there's more honesty in it than Sir Howard allows.