Christie Malry's Own Double Entry.

I thought I'd recommend this book by B.S.Johnson to anyone who hasn't read it. (Well, no real point recommending it to people who have.)

I came across it it when I was at university in the seventies and, as Hen is now, interested in cutting-edge writing above all else. I was disillusioned with the then contemporary British novel of wishy-washy writers (major value judgement here, sorry) like Carter, Middleton, and Murdoch, and took refuge in Sartre, Beckett, Sarraute, Celine. And then I found Christy Malry, a fresh, concise and original British novel, of all things - a miraculous one-off. The book is a short, sharp, above-all funny, read, which includes double-entry accounts that chart the protagonist's reckoning in his bizarre, increasingly terroristic struggle against society.

I wanted to read more Johnson, but this was his only book in print and I discovered that he had just committed suicide. (As had the only only other British experimental novelist I knew of, Ann Quin.) I was writing a mad experimental novel myself at the time and felt suicidal, too. This news didn't help.

Now I've just read Jonathan Coe's biography of B.S.Johnson: "Like a Fiery Elephant", and everythinhg at last becomes clear. The man was a one-man rage against the literary establishment, finally burning himself out in what he perceived as failure. I can't really recommend this biography, even though it's a good read, because Johnson's story is so relentlessly tragic and hopeless. And, as so often with literary biographies, a hero emerged as less of a hero in the end (Johnson's ego and temper are deeply dislikeable). But Christie Malry remains, in my opinion, one of the best English novels of the twentieth century.