The idiotic campaign against Elizabeth Gilbert

At the end of the 1920s, Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Im Westen nichts Neues appeared in English as All Quiet On The Western Front. For its readership in this country a devastating, grinding war against an enemy they had been encouraged to think of as bestial and inhuman huns was in recent memory. Here was a book that told how the war had been for those huns in the opposing trenches; that showed it wasn’t all that different for them at all. Nobody, as far as I know, even as our cities were filled with broken, disfigured, disabled and traumatised veterans, attempted to suppress Remarque’s book on the grounds that it encouraged sympathy for Germans. In fact, the only people who tried to suppress it were the Nazis.

Compare the reaction, now, to Elizabeth Gilbert’s new novel The Snow Forest. No sooner had its publication been announced than it was bombarded on Goodreads with one-star reviews (why Goodreads allows people to post reviews of books they cannot possibly have read is an issue for another day; eejits gonna eejit).