IF I WERE A WRITER as healthily suspicious of the world as Brian Fawcett, I'd probably assume that the curious neglect of his book of essays about literature and politics, Unusual Circumstances, Interesting Times (New Star, 199 1), was a conspiracy of sorts.

Maybe he shouldn't have called our national cultural icon Alice Munro an "antiquarian miniaturist"; it might have been wiser not to trample the novelist Barry Callaghan's testicles. And was it really necessary to go screeching over the top on the subject of the Argentine master Jorge Luis Borges?

But wait a sec. Before burrowing into the involuted activity of reviewing particular book reviews in order to unearth certain disturbing symptoms about our literary culture, I'd better file a frank declaration of convergent interests. To wit:

I know Brian Fawcett; I publish books with the publisher of Fawcett's Unusual Circumstances, New Star, a small Vancouver firm; I'm also aware that Fawcett is a minor mucky-muck ("advisory editor") with Books in Canada, which admittedly makes all of this sound terribly clubby. Forelock-tugging apologies for the smallness and inevitable infra-familiarity of our culture are duly proffered. (Am I required to add that, as far as I know, I haven't slept with Mr. Fawcett?)

Shufflings in the dust completed, here's what I want to know: how is it possible for one of the country's most important writers to publish a substantial volume of theoretical and polemical essays, only to find them virtually ignored in the nation's book pages or -where noticed - treated for the most part to reviews that are trivial, amateurish, and ignorant?

Now it's your turn to say, Wait a minute. Who says that Fawcett is "one of the country's most important writers ?" Well, obviously I do. But it's not just me.

From Margaret Drabble to the book pages of the Los Angeles Times, testimonials to the significance of Fawcett's works abound -especially with respect to Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow (Talonbooks, 1986, Grove Weidenfeld, Penguin) and Public Eye: An Investigation into the Disappearance of the World (HarperCollins, Grove Weidenfeld, 1990). Whether measured by sustained output or the prestige of his international publishers (or whatever scale you might propose), Fawcett has attained most of the conventional markers of literary success. Even if we downscale that "one of the most important writers..." phrase, I suspect that most observers would concede that Fawcett is one of the country's writers to whom serious attention must be accorded if we're to regard our literary institutional apparatus as other than mickey mouse.

Yet, it's precisely such attention that's at issue over Unusual Circumstances. The book was published in November, 1991. Six months later, it was noticed as follows: favourably in the Vancouver Sun; ditto in a Vancouver-area suburban newspaper; briefly but enthusiastically mentioned, in one of those "items" columns that now decorate most newspapers, by the Calgary Herald books editor Ken McGoogan ("It's folly to rave about a book you haven't finished, but that's what I'm driven to doing..."), and subsequently followed up with a thoughtful review by George Melnyk; cursorily lumped in with two other volumes of essays and reviewed by 1. M. Owen in Books in Canada; and subjected to a review headed "Why Beat a Dead Bug-eyed Mole ?" by Douglas Bell, "a freelance writer living in Toronto" published in the local (but not national) edition of the Globe and Mail. I may have missed something, but I think that's it.

It's the Globe review that I want to focus on as symptomatic of what's wrong with a good deal of book reviewing in Canada. But let's pause to consider the nodding indifference of Canada's media capital.

The Globe (for which I work as a book columnist) at least deigns to notice Fawcett, albeit in a clearly "minor" review. Books in Canada offers a dismissive half-dozen paragraphs. Quill & Quire ignores it, though not Fawcett's subsequent book, Compact Gardens (Camden House, 1992), which is chastised for polemics about marigolds. Judy Stoffman, books editor of the Toronto Star, in explaining the paper's decision not to review Unusual Circumstances, says, "It came at a time when there were a million books vying for review, and essay collections are particularly difficult to handle." Not exactly riveting attentiveness, is it?

Now the reason that some of us take Fawcett seriously is not because of his previous glowing notices by esteemed literary figures, or the prestige of his international publishers, or the sheen of his prematurely grey hair. Rather, it's because of two things. First, Fawcett is one of the few writers around who dares (or is foolish enough) to attempt to make sense of the state of global culture, economics, and politics, and to argue that literature has a role to play in that process. Second, he does so in the course of challenging, exploring, and even inventing current genres of writing. In short, Fawcett has ideas, and is impolite enough to put them into practice (the subtitle of the work at hand is ... And Other Impolite Interventions).

Which brings us to Douglas Bell's review of Unusual Circumstances in the Globe. Leaving aside the trappings, the gist of what Bell has to say is as follows: "From the first page, Fawcett confronts his reader with idea relentlessly piled upon idea ...... According to Bell, Fawcett's relentless critique "derives primarily from his apocalyptic view of the contemporary condition." Fawcett is then quoted to the effect that, "Today we're less citizens than we are consumers, and in burning up the planet's resources we've driven ourselves to the point of intellectual, economic and ecological collapse." Bell doesn't indicate whether he finds that "apocalyptic view" plausible or not, but proceeds directly to: "And on it goes, page after page, polemic after polemic. It's not that the stuff is boring, it's just that it's so ... exhausting." There is nothing else of significance in Bell's assessment.

While the Star and Quill & Quire stand mute, and Books in Canada settles for trivialization, the Globe's review is just plain amateurish and ignorant. Bell never bothers to mention how these essays of Fawcett's connect to his previous work (indeed, there's no mention of Fawcett's previous work at all - presumably, because Bell hasn't bothered to read it). And clearly, Bell is too "exhausted" to discuss any of the ideas that Fawcett "relentlessly" piles one on top of the other. When undergraduates turn in papers reporting that a work is "full of ideas," the marking prof usually gently nudges them with a standard marginalia query: "Which ideas? Discuss."

This isn't the place to rehearse the panoply of ideas to be found in Fawcett's book. They range from decided views on the writer's responsibility in society to the meaning of the Wayne Gretzky hockey trade to the fate of the earth. Personally, I've seldom encountered an idea in Fawcett's writing that wasn't worth arguing with, or that wasn't put felicitously or provocatively enough to engage the reader.

Yet he clearly makes some people uncomfortable. At this point, I'm tempted to engage in an examination of those things in Fawcett's writing that may make people uncomfortable: is he justified in criticizing Alice Munro as an "antiquarian miniaturist"? Is his savaging of Callaghan's novel The Way the Angel Spreads Her Wings - the essay is entitled "Through a Testosterone-Smeared Glass, Darkly" - on the mark? Is his hysteria about Borges - which was mentioned by almost all of the reviewers who noticed the book at all, and which provided the Globe headline, "Why Beat a Dead Bug-eyed Mole?" - grounded in anything other than self-indulgence? But let's leave all that to the M.A. students.

However, I did pause in the middle of writing this admittedly awkward piece - while defending a friend is a venerably honourable genre, was I merely engaged in an elaborate form of special pleading? - long enough to reread three or four of Fawcett's essays just to make sure I wasn't crazy. I read his fond encomium for the urban planner Hans Blumenfeld, his update on the Cambodian situation, and his cranky essay slagging Borges (it bears the Sartrean title, "What is Literature For?"). I was reassured that I was not crazy, and that Fawcett's writing oughtn't to be trivialized by Bell's characterization "Brian Fawcett is mad as hell and he's not going to fake it anymore."

Being a generally unsuspicious person, I'm tempted to look for all the contingencies that might rationally explain the neglect of Unusual Circumstances. There are plenty of possibilities. 1) This particular book is published by a small West Coast

publisher and doesn't command the immediate attention of say, a HarperCollins release. 2) Swamped and overworked editors of book pages (which are generally despised within daily newspapers, at least by advertising departments) farm out an overflow of new books almost randomly to underpaid and undertrained reviewers. The matching of reviewers and books is hardly an exact science (although, if this had been a volume of essays by Robertson Davies, I'm sure somebody would have rung up Robert Fulford to find out what he was doing that weekend). 3) Somebody had a nifty idea: "Oh, look, here are three volumes of essays. Why don't we get someone to do them as a package?" (the Books in Canada solution?) 4) And there are simply the accidents of daily life. Maybe the treatment accorded Fawcett's book really is an exception, and unrelated either to the content or the manner of his writing.

If I can't persuade myself of some mixture of the above (the more complicated the better), then I'm stuck with two unpalatable options. One is some version of a conspiracy theory. But do I really want to get myself to believe - to take an obviously false and ludicrous example - that an aggrieved Barry Callaghan somehow persuaded the Star books editor Stoffman to perform a Jehovah's-Witness-style shunning of Fawcett's book?

The other option is to suggest, as a generalization, that there is a widespread reluctance in Canadian book reviewing to come to terms with books that deal with uncomfortable ideas and especially with impolitely expressed uncomfortable ideas; that such books tend to provoke a typically Canadian 1-don't-smell-anything-bad, do-you-smell-anything-bad sidestepping of the offending item.

I suspect that the unpleasantly-expressed-difficult- ideas hypothesis is true, but frankly, I don't have enough evidence at hand to sustain it. And there is seeming, though possibly illusory, counter-evidence. If this were a book of feminist or multicultural essays by a writer comparably prominent to Fawcett, it would, I'm almost certain, get full-scale critical treatment. Which reduces my proto-thesis to certain-kinds-of-unfashionable-unpleasantly-expressed-difficult-ideas.... Well, I'm painting myself into a comer.

No, it's much easier to think of this as simply an oversight. And to settle for calling readers' attention to an unintended injustice. Since it's so rare for a book that has been critically wronged to get a sustained second look - and since I'm far more polite than Mr. Fawcett - maybe we should leave it at that. For now.