Backlisted - Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry by B.S. Johnson

Episode Date: January 25, 2016

Emmy award winning writer and broadcaster David Quantick (Veep, The Thick of It, TV Burp) joins John and Andy in the Unbound offices to discuss his favourite novel, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry by B.S. Johnson. Plus how to pronounce Velasquez, Silbury Hill, the death of the possessive apostrophe in retail, and Mathew Clayton's tenuous link. Timings: (may differ due to adverts)4'23 - On Silbery Hill by Adam Thorpe 9'29 The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velazquez by Laura Cumming 15'21 - Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry by B.S. Johnson* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

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There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness and July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. You know the gentleman whose picture you tweeted to me this morning? Oh, yes.

That gentleman. Yes. He blocked me on Twitter about six months ago for pointing out... He blocked me for pointing out that there's no apostrophe in Dexys Midnight Runners. And as my wife said, it's sort of what you want that person... Oh, yeah. It's not what you want that gentleman to do, to react quite so... That's what it does.

Neither in Dexys nor indeed in Finnegans, as you've discovered to your cost, Matt. Yeah. Thanks. Dexys, nor indeed in Finnegans, as you've discovered to your cost, Matt. Yeah. Thanks. No apostrophe in Howards End, Dexys, Midnight Runners or Finnegans, wait. Does that mean they're not belonging to those particular people? Correct. They're just names. They are separate clauses.

There's that thing in Stephen Pinker's book about the Toronto Maple Leafs. It's a brilliant explanation of why they're not called the Toronto Maple Leaves. Because they're named after the Maple Leafs, so they're the Toronto Maple Leafs. And the possessive is the Toronto Maple Leafs apostrophe. And so on and so forth.

That's not just because they were named by a bunch of French people who didn't care. It's because they're a football team and they can't read. It's actually spelled M-A-L-P. There's now no apostrophe in Waterstones either, which still causes me deep pain every time I see that. There's a lot of fuss about that on the internet. Well, I know it's annoying to be fussed,

but it is actually, his name is Tim Waterstone. It's a decisive of fuss about that on the internet. Well, I know. And I know it's annoying to be fussed, but it is actually... His name is Tim Waterstone. It's a decisive break with the past. Just ditching an apostrophe. As though that's going to make any difference. What's W.H. Smith's? Where's the apostrophe in that? Is there one?

Yeah, I think there is. Where's the apostrophe in Earl's Court and Baron's Court? Now we're going to come on, gents. On the district line, surely. Where's the apostrophe in Earl's Court and Baron's Court? Come on, gents. On the district line, surely. One has an apostrophe and the other doesn't, but I can't remember which is which now. W.H. Smith is called W.H. Smith now.

People call it W.H. Smith as one word. I've seen people say, I went into W.H. Smith. And that is what it is. So it's not even Smith. W.H. Smith and Sun Limited. Do you think Boots will eventually become Boot? Boot. In a similar way. See, is what it is. So it's not even Smith. WH Smith and Sun Limited. Do you think Boots will eventually become Boot? Boot. In a similar way.

See, they were quite smart. They thought, I don't want to be called Boot. Boot sounds really good. Jay Sainsbury. Then you get things like Tesco's, which isn't a name. Like a person. Yeah, Tesco's. Alan Tesco.

Nicky Tesco. Nicky Tesco. Is that an apostrophe? Well, it used to, anyway. I think that's enough, really.co used to crackling on fire today absolutely on fire you've just joined us welcome to an hour on the apostrophe with my friends

the pedants revolt hello and welcome to another episode of Backlisted a podcast sponsored by Unbound, the website where readers and writers come together to make great books. We're actually sitting in the library of Unbound recording this. And I'm John Mitchinson, publisher of Unbound. And hello, everyone.

I'm Andy Miller. I'm the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. We are Leavis and Butthead. We're joined, as ever, by our young friend, Matthew Clayton, the writer Matthew Clayton. Hello, Matthew. Hello. I think I should be called MS Clayton today. Yes, MS Clayton. Certainly MS. In honour of our discussion.

And our special guest today is David Quantick. DJ LP Quantick. Ooh! DJ LP Quantick. That's like Anthony Valerian John Cheetham, the publisher. Ooh! What's the LP? Le Page. My great-grandfather was a ferry captain from the Channel Islands, and my great-grandmother lived in Plymouth,

so all the men in my family have Le Page as a middle name because one of my ancestors mistakenly believed that by doing so they would be left a vast amount of money by some rich people in the Channel Islands. We're still waiting for it and while we wait while we wait we toil away in a bit we're going to be discussing the novel christy mowry's own double entry by bs johnson but before we get on to that john what have you been reading this week? I've been reading and enjoying hugely a book called On Silbury Hill by Adam Thorpe Now Adam Thorpe is a novelist

and is probably best known for his first novel which has kind of become a modern classic called Uvvotin And that is a wonderful, wonderful book Yeah, and which was kind of a he basically told the story of a Berkshire village more or less from the 17th century through to modern times, using the voice, the dialect, different characters. It was a sort of modernist approach to telling a very rural tale,

and it was interesting to me because it was disliked intensely by Salman Rushdie. It's also now Nausgaard's favourite British novel. Is it really? Because, he says, itgaard's favourite British novel. Is it really? Because he says it's not like a British novel. Well, we had a huge row when I was judging many years ago the Best of Young British Novelists 1993 with Mr Rushdie. And I was amazed because I thought he would love it. I mean, I brought it to the table as my best offer

for books that had been published in recent times. And he didn't like it he just said the pastoral is dead and i rather thought well yes maybe but that's the whole point about this book anyway i haven't read all of adam's novels since then but this is easily the best thing i've read by him since i absolutely adore it it's a meditation it's a memoir by the excellent publisher little toller who published a lot of books in this area. And I guess it positions itself in this interesting moment that we seem to have as people writing essays about landscape, about history and the past.

It's a memoir on one level of his growing up, and he travelled around a lot when he was a kid. His parents were all sort of from India and Africa. But he went to school at Marlboroughborough and he also grew up in the suburbs. And it's his relationship with a landscape and particularly with this one extraordinary, possibly the most extraordinary prehistoric monument anywhere, Silbury Hill, which is a man-made hill built with antler pixies and bits of chalk hewn out of the ground and made into a, I mean, it's several hundred feet high.

It's huge. As he says at one point, if you had, as it were, the Statue of Liberty behind it, you'd only be able to see the Statue of Liberty's torch. And we have absolutely no idea why it was built. I sent you a link to a Julian Cove song... Yes, I did. ..called By the Light of the Silbury Moon,

which is terrific. And, of course, he of the Silbury Moon which is terrific and of course he writes about Silbury Hill a lot but not in the way Adam Thorpe does. Well Adam Thorpe, it's great, it's got elements of history, it's got elements of memoir as I've said, it's got all the speculation it was a big, there was a book in the 70s by Michael Danes

which basically was all part of this idea that all of these in that area, Avebury, Stonehenge, Silbury, that the whole thing was a massive astronomical kind of calculator. And there are definitely some elements of that that are still being... But they've dug into it several times and they found really nothing inside it

except for interesting clay and interesting remains of insects. And it was obviously, it wasn't the same size, it was built in stages. It was smaller and then grew larger. I think it's full of jam. Yeah, well that would be funny. It's just a theory.

But to be honest, it's almost as good as most of the theories. But I guess that's the thing, if you're interested in any kind of meditation on the past and what the past is, I mean, Adam Thorpe, right, he writes beautifully. Adam Thorpe's not just a novelist, we should say, as well. He's a poet, and he's written plays, and he's translated

Madame Bovary, and... And he wrote a whole play in Berkshire dialect once as well, for which some cred must be given. When Alberton came out, it's when I was working at Waterstones in Earl's Court. Don't look for it. It's not there anymore.

It's been razed to the ground. And we did an event with Adam Thorpe. He was ever so nice. And in order to ensure... Because clearly nobody really knew who he was when that novel came out. No, it came really pretty much out of left field for most people. To ensure that some people came, Hilary Mantel very generously and off her own bat had said to him, if you are doing

any events in London, let me know and I'll come and introduce you and interview you. So we did this event with Hilary Mantel and Adam Thorpe. She loves that novel. I think she said that's her favourite novel of the last 30 years or something as well. Then she published A Place of Greater Safety and Flood. I think those were the only two books that she published. But it was still a big deal for her to come and very generously front up for him. Well, as I say, the mystery of the hill itself is unsolved. But he writes so beautifully around it. Just to give you a little tiny bit of the...

Which he says, Perhaps nothing as spectacular and lovely has ever been created since on our islands. No work of art or architecture or technological achievement. And what we now have is a mere husk. Which is a bit sad, but no. I couldn't recommend it highly enough. On Silbury Hill, Adam Thorpe by the excellent Little Toller Press.

Andy. Andy. Thanks. What have you been reading? When we talk about the books I've been reading, I normally talk about an older book, but I wanted to talk this week about a book that was only published last week, but just is the most... This is coming to you in January 2015, just so you're listening to this

in 2015. It's a book by Laura Cumming called The Vanishing Man in Pursuit of Velathqueth. Now, I knew that would happen, listeners, when I said Velathqueth, so I'm just going to read what Laura says about this specific issue. You're going to read it with lisps. It's a very interesting point.

We are hesitant with Velathquith's name in English, wondering whether we have lisped it correctly. El Greco is easy to pronounce. Goya sounds as it looks. Van Gogh we have arrived at as something quite other than the Dutch pronunciation, a sort of harsh

anglicisation that has long since settled into consensus. But Velazquez is uneasy in any version, properly Hispanicised or not Hispanicised. We do not mention him too often for all his transcendent genius. His is not a name on most people's lips. I thought this was going to be a book about Velazquez's painting, and it is a book about the painting.

It's a biography, but it's also a biography with a story of a man called John Snare a 19th century printer and bookseller he was a printer he's a bookseller from Reading who chanced upon a portrait of Prince Charles to become King Charles I in a country house sale. The discovery of which led him initially to fame and fortune and then to utter penury and disaster. penurium disaster so laura coming tells the story of the painter the story of the painting the story of people who owned the painting and furthermore a meditation on what art means at different points to different people of different classes and i thought it was the most incredible. I mean, she writes beautifully. So you start off, it's a delight to read. But as it goes on, the weaving of it into a real book rather than, I mean, there's a phrase that I've used a lot,

which people do use a lot in the business of a long magazine article. And if this book didn't work, it would be a long and perfectly interesting magazine article. But it functions as a book in three dimensions. It's absolutely wonderful. I'm glad you mentioned that. I was going to say before that the Adam Thorpe is

a monograph, which I kind of never really know what's the difference. It looks like a book. It's got chapters. How many words is it? I don't know. It's probably about 50,000. Sounds like a book to me. And that definitely looks like much more than a long article. This book is probably about 50,000 sounds like a book to me and that definitely looks like much more than a long article this book is probably about 100,000 words and there are plenty of books around which are about 100,000 words

which nonetheless are which seem like very long magazine articles because they don't accumulate they don't add up to more than the sum of their parts but this is not one of them this is incredible and I'm making this a hostage to fortune.

I'd be very surprised if this doesn't win a prize or two. And I would love people to read it because actually the balance between, you know, history and storytelling and critical theory is a thing that lots of people try and relatively few people can pull off and make page turnings. But Velazquez is interesting, or Velázquez is interesting, because he's one of those painters that you hear people always saying

he's the greatest painter of all time, the best, he's absolutely the best, which is interesting because you look and you think, well, quite good, that looks like a painting of a Spanish nobleman and that looks like a painting of some Spanish children. But it's only when you get them really sort of talking to you about you know his technique and his brush strokes and all that sort of which is fine i mean i'm i'm prepared to take it on face value not as an art critic but i did go to the prado prado in madrid and uh this is just silly now yeah sorry to see the goya amongst other things but i did find actually in end, I came out of that thinking,

yeah, I don't know what it is about Velázquez. It's weird, the paintings themselves, the physical things themselves, are pretty astonishing. She's so, one of the things that's so inspiring about this book is she's absolutely wonderful at relating her own experience of seeing the paintings in the flesh, and indeed that's the starting point of the book, the thing you've just described,

of going into the Prado and seeing the painting hanging there. But actually, she's brilliant as well at painting, no pun intended, a picture of you of the world in which you couldn't just look on the internet. No. And if you wanted to go and see a painting, you had to make long, arduous journeys to other countries in order to stand there and see it and never be able to see it again, to try and take the memory away with you. One of the ways in which the book really inspired me is it made me think, well, you know, I'm in my late 40s. I might have another 20 years on average.

On average. There's at least half a dozen paintings that i love that i've never seen that i would love to you know go to chicago and stand in front of la grange and see la grange rather than the year of looking dangerously here we come yeah that's the other thing about monographs they don't fund trips to chic. In my experience, perhaps Adam Thorpe's has a different one. I don't know. Yeah, Labours of Love, I think. Yeah, Labours of Love. Anyway, so that's The Vanishing Man by Laura Cumming. And that is a wonderful, wonderful book. We'll pick this up again after some adverts. Stay tuned to this. Discover more value than ever at Loblaws. Like Fresh Promise.

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B.S. Johnson, who was for a period at least one of the most famous and fated English novelists, took his own life at the age of 40 in 1973. Yeah, I'm just going to, there's a wonderful biography of B.S. Johnson by our former guest on Backlisted, Jonathan Coe. The biography is called Like a Fiery Elephant. And just before we start, I'm going to read just a paragraph from that, which if anyone listening doesn't know who B.S. Johnson was, this will place him. This is what Jonathan Coe says about B.S. Johnson.

He says, Brian Stanley Johnson was, if you like, Britain's one-man literary avant-garde of the 1960s, at least publicly, anyway. He was a working-class Londoner born in Hammersmith in 1933 whose childhood was defined by the trauma of wartime evacuation and his failure to pass the 11-plus. He worked in banking and accountancy and as a teacher

before winning places at Birkbeck College and King's College London. In the space of 10 years, he wrote seven novels, of which the one we're going to talk about today, Christy Mowry's own double entry, was his sixth and the last published in his lifetime. And in addition, he wrote poetry, plays, wrote or directed more than a dozen short films. He was a sports reporter, too too and a reviewer and a polemicist and he worked tirelessly for the trade union movement making documentaries and propaganda

films. He died by his own hand at the age of 40 and in fact although he's known as a novelist now first and foremost he was doing all these other things at the same time and it's worth saying that he wrote seven novels in 10 years. Seven pretty extraordinary novels in various ways, which we'll come on and talk about. But David, you said to me earlier that Christy Mowry's own

double entry is your favourite, all-time favourite novel. Yeah, it just combines so many things that I like. It's quite scary. It's very funny. It's quite short. I like that as well. People have sneered at it before. It's an experiment in form which I enjoy. It's a great story. It's quite, as I say, terrifying at points. It just seems to fit every... It's a great... Yeah, every

criterion for a book for me. Shall we do the blurb? Yeah. Here it is. This is off the 2001 A Depicador edition, which we think is a very good blurb. We're pleased with this one. Christy Mallory is a simple man. His job in a bank puts him next to but not in possession of money.

As a clerk, he learns the principles of double-entry bookkeeping and adapts them in his own dramatic fashion to settle his personal account with society. Under the column-headed aggra for Offences Received from Society, Unpleasantness of Bank Manager, General Diminution of Life Caused by Advertising, Debit Christie, Under Recompense for Offences Given Back to Society, General Removal of Items of Stationery,

Pork Pie Purveyors Limited Bomb Hoax, Credit Christie. All accounts are to be settled in full, and they are in the most alarming way. And then there's a great quote. This is weird. They've taken this off, the latest edition. A most gifted writer, Samuel Beckett. And the future of the novel depends on people like B.S. Johnson, Anthony Burgess.

Do you think that is because Samuel Beckett and B.S. Johnson are less well-known than Oberon Waugh? Well, actually, in the Jonathan Cobook, it explains that. It says that Samuel Beckett objected to being quoted on the blurbs of B.S. Johnson's books. And also that Johnson spent his life, it's clear, from Like a Fiery Elephant, seemingly in every letter that he wrote to anyone quoting Beckett to tell people how great he was.

In an endearing manner, I have to say. But also Beckett was like Stephen King of his day. Every book had something by him. A fantastic... Harold Robbins. Harold Robbins, a fantastic read, Samuel Beckett. Once I had picked up The Spy Who Loved Me, I could not put it down, Samuel Beckett.

Watership Down made me cry, Samuel Beckett. If anyone is listening to this can settle a small bet, I'm willing to wager that that excellent blurb was written by Peter Strauss. Yeah, well, it's good. It's good. It's better than the latest one. I'm prepared to say that.

Having said that, I think credit where credit's due, Picador are to be commended for bringing back, I think they've brought back four or five of B.S. Johnson's novels. Pickle have reprinted all the ones they are able to. The estate are happy for them to reprint. It's the first uniform edition I think I'm right in saying. You could get Christy Mowry

in the 1980s, you could get House Mother Normal. And yeah, it was really, I mean living now in a world where you can actually get almost everything by B.S. Johnson in any major bookstore or online is just a dream to me When did you first read

Christie Mayer's? I think it was 1976, it was in the local library you know there would be books in there that I liked as a teenager you'd get something out just because you liked the name and as I say this was short and it was just... I mean, Jonathan Coe has said that it fit his teenage worldview because it was surreal, it was like Python or The Goons

and there is that sense of humour, there's that fourth wall thing. You know, when you're a teenager, you love the fact that he keeps breaking cover and addressing you directly. So the humour and the darkness and the anarchy. Yeah, I thought it was really full of anarchy. It felt like something that, you know, if I would... I only read it this week, but I would have loved to have read it in 1976, 1977,

because it must have had real power then, I imagine. It's one of those books that you... They're very rarely where you get something that's as short. There's not a single unenjoyable moment in this book, which is, God knows, that's rare. The extraordinary thing, it does all those things you're saying david but it does it without being you know he hated the word experimental because that was always used as a sort of a stick to beat his work with but it's just playful isn't it that's what i loved about it

it's just you think here's somebody who's absolutely has thought more about the novel than almost anybody else but is still able to create a brilliant narrative about a completely recognizable 17 year old when he starts the novel working in in a tedious first of all a bank and then in a tedious factory but he makes the factory almost that's what i the detail of going from all the different all the different departments he writes brilliantly about that, I think. The other thing is that all B.S. Johnson's books are also about A, books, B, writing books, and C, B.S. Johnson.

But in a way which is successful. It could be terrible. David was talking about the breaking the fourth wall. I'll only read a couple of sentences here, but this is the start of a typical chapter. An attempt should be made to characterise Christie's appearance. I do so with diffidence in the knowledge that such physical descriptions are rarely of value in a novel.

It's fantastic. One of the great things about it is, yes, there's personal experience in it. These are jobs that Johnson had. There is a degree of affection for his factory years, you're quite right. But at this point in his career, you know, I mean, biography isn't that important to a novel. It doesn't matter entirely. Even with B.S. Johnson, it's not entirely relevant what he had for breakfast and how he was feeling. At this point of his career, you know, he's, well, he's going to be dead soon at his own hand, as you said.

But there's none of that in this book. This book has got bitterness at society it's a revenge novel, it's about a sociopath it's probably full of things that Johnson wanted to do to people but it's a frothy book it's a light read, it's like if American Psycho had been written by Noel Caron

there's my blur that is genius I love that, but I love also I love a bit of escalation in a novel. And it does escalate from making a mark on a building to, by the end, without giving too much away, mass murder of a whole London suburb. It's one of the things that he was so brilliant at, though,

is taking an idea and seeing it through. We'll talk about some of the other novels in a minute, but the idea that you is taking an idea and seeing it through we'll talk about some of the other novels in a minute but the idea that you would take an idea and logically progress it to mass murder that's a very bs johnson thing to do that key idea is in a way it's a satire on the whole he takes double entry accounting bookkeeping and uses that i mean it's a brilliant device in the novel the idea that the perceived slights, it's a moral double entry. He feels he's been dissed by people.

So he has to, in order for the books to balance, he has to do something to balance it up. But of course, by the end of the book, he's severely in credit against society at large. What's the brilliant thing about socialism? He puts in towards the end, which he puts in a vast amount of money, that the unrealisability of socialism

is basically that society owes him for that. Yeah. I also just love the madness of, like, the death of his mother. It's this brilliant kind of monologue, which apparently his mother, I think, had died, or was... At the time the book was written, or maybe died shortly afterwards, but it was...

After, Chris, it was meant to be a trilogy, starting with See the Old Lady, Decently. The titles all add up. See the Old Lady, Decently, Berries, I've read it. It's meant to be a monograph about England and about his mother's death and an autobiography. So, yeah, obviously that's in his mind at this point. But The Death of His Mother, which is the bit I'll be reading in a bit,

is just... Well, it's a fantastic piece of writing. There's no point describing it. So I'm just going to run through the novels that lead up to this one. Very quickly, as I say, they were written in the space for about ten years. The first one is called Travelling People. A fantastic book. It's the most conventional book that he wrote,

the one that he and his estate don't want published again, which is fantastically annoying unless you're rich. Well, thanks to our friend and colleague Scott Pack, we have a copy of Travelling People right here, which he has very kindly borrowed from the London Library because it will set you back, as you say, about £200 to buy a copy. I wonder why even the estate won't let it be repurposed. I know why Johnson didn't want it repurposed.

He didn't like it. He didn't want it to be respectful to his wishes. I mean, it's a brilliant book, but it's kind of not typical of what he wanted. It's the equivalent of a really cool electronic band releasing a set of blues songs that they wrote when they started. It's a beautiful novel. It's a conventional novel.

It's brilliantly written. It's very autobiographical, which is a very Johnson thing. But I think from his point of view, he probably thought it was too easy. Well, also, yeah, it has different chapters written in different voices. It has all black pages. But as he said, these weren't innovations. They were things that had been done by, for instance, Lawrence Stern in Tristram Shandy.

So he hasn't quite got to grips with the sort of novel he wants to write yet. And yet it's a brilliant... That's the frustrating thing, because if it was a crap book, you'd be like, oh, fair enough. Yeah, yeah. But it's a really... You know, it's one of his best books. So that's written in...

That's published in 63. That wins a prize. He then immediately writes another book published in 64 called Albert Angelo which is a comedy based on his experience of being a teacher and is that the one that has got the cut out that is the one that has

hilariously somebody was spoiling the plot of Christy Mowry on the internet this morning and he said I've just read Albert Angelo and I like spoilers because it is a book with a famous spoiler yet it cuts through to a quote from a play and whilst reading the whole book because it's a brilliant way a famous spoiler, yet it cuts through to a quote from a play. And whilst reading the whole book,

because it's a brilliant way, you're aware of the event. Now, if it was a film, you would have it on a little window in the corner of the screen, this event replaying. It has the whole cut and the page, but it also has the very famous, the first infamous and brilliant B.S. Johnson-ism is in this book, which is the phrase, I'll call this lying. Johnson believed and said frequently that telling stories is telling lies. And the novel can only progress

if it incorporates, honestly, that element of acknowledging that it's fake. And this is the moment that it all starts to come apart because essentially it's like a painter saying that paint is lies. Essentially what Johnson is doing, Johnson's a brilliant writer. He's really good at making things up. He's really good at telling stories and lying.

But he's decided this is a bad thing. So essentially what he's saying, this is where Troll, the next novel, comes in, that a novel is transcription. In the end, a novel is writing, I am writing, and it becomes circular, self-eating. So in the end, a novelist is a man who's writing, I am writing a novel. And trawl, which I think is the next one,

is the one where he gets a job on a trawler so he can write a book about his experiences, even though he's never seen a fish in his life. Fred Warburg of Saccharin Warburg said to him, Brian, you can write these books, but I've signed you up to write novels. You're just going to deliver autobiographies. Yeah, this is true.

But he follows Troll with probably his most famous book, The Unfortunate, which is the book in the box. It has 27 chapters, 25 of which may be shuffled into any order you wish. For what it's worth, it's my favourite of B.S.

Johnson's novels. It's probably the archetypal, you know, I mean, if we're going to use rock comparisons, it's the Sergeant Pepper or the Ziggy Stardust of his career, to be a bit naff. It combines all the great elements of his work, autobiography, experimentation, humour, emotion, because while he was someone who believed in playing with form and, to tell you the truth, he believed very much in emotion,

it has a lovely trick in it where, you know, he's a sports writer, and the whole book centres around a moment where he's sent to watch a match in a town, and he suddenly knows he's been to this town before. This is the town where his friend Tony lived, Tony who became ill and died. And I believe, actually pasted, just having a quick check, in the book, right at the end,

is the actual match report by B.S. Johnson, which is fantastic. Someone should do a collection of B.S. Johnson's football reviews. They will. And then fast, Gordon hit a fierce shot, the ball struck Moles' outstretched foot and went over Edson into the goal. The unfortunate is fantastic.

The thing that David was saying there as well, about how it's a really moving book and there's a really interesting, slightly sniffy overview of Johnson's career by Frank Kermode. And Frank Kermode says of The Unfortunate, Johnson was such a good writer that his novels survived his quixotic attempts to ruin them for the reader. You know, the heart in what is quite an intellectual exercise in The Unfortunate

and the evocation of a friendship in it is, to me, it's integrated brilliantly with the form in which it comes. They're not separate, you know. That's sort of what impressed me. I'm just going to read a little bit just to show, because it's... You know, most experimentation has that terrible... sort of smells a bit of the lamp, you know.

It looks for, oh, I'm being experimental because I want to say I'm being experimental. But with Johnson, it's almost... He can't... He's telling a story in an experimental way that somehow you're still reading in an enjoyable way as a reader. You don't feel... Just this little bit where he goes to see the shrike his girlfriend who's a brilliant character

they go to see the shrike's old mum and the old mum says this kind of she lives in islington oh it was worth it all those years of sacrifice just to get my daughter placed in a respectable novel like this you know it's my crowning achievement. And with only one leg, too. The Shrike's old mum suddenly took off an artificial limb which had hitherto been unapparent to Christy and waved it triumphantly. Sticker bombs, it was, went on the Shrike's old mum. The first got St Mary's Church in Upper Street,

the second got that brothel on the corner of Dagmar Terrace, and the third got me and my old man. The church, sex and marriage, observed Christy laughing. That's too neat. That's how it happens, said the Shrike's old mum. You can't muck about with how it happened, can you? I'll have a word with you later about your obsession with knocking religion, said the Shrike to Christy quietly and without venom. And now we must go, old mum. Sunday's the only day we have for a really long f***ing c***. Cheerio. Ring if you want us for anything.

See you Tuesday night as usual. And who said we were married anyway, shouted the Shrike's old mum after them them slowly lifting the leg to wake them goodbye that is a mad vertigo inducing paragraph but it completely works the thing is so christy maury and the book that precedes it his last two novels published in his lifetime they're both comedies house mother normal christy maury's own double entry they're comedies, they're both ideas that he had at the time that he was writing Travelling People, back in 1963. And his own argument was always that the emotional need and autobiographical need to write Albert Angelo Troll and the Unfortunates

got in the way of him, you know, not writing those comic novels earlier. And in the case of both House Mother Normal and Christy Mowry, you can see there is a... It's almost like Johnson has set himself a puzzle. Can I create this ornate little box of a thing and make it play as a novel? Don't you think with House Mother Normal as well?

House Mother Normal's amazing because it's far better than it needs to be. Essentially, it's the classic thing. It tells a story of, let's say, eight characters from different points of view. The same evening, the same actions, all seen from different POVs of various elderly people

in different states of physical and mental decline. That's fine. It's all fine. But page by page, it's exact moment to moment. Page two of one character's narrative is the same as page two of another character's narrative. He doesn't have to do that, but it's so precise. You could overlay the pages. If you could read through paper,

he overlays the pages and it all matches second by second. It probably took him a day, but it would take a normal human being years. It's so precise. I mean, the thing is as well, these books aren't available currently electronically, which is a shame, because it would be nice if they were available in e-book form.

But also, like The Unfortunate and Housemar, the normal, they're like analogue versions of things that would be done digitally now. Brian Eno would have written them. It's so true, though. Since the invention of computer art, Analogue versions of things that would be done digitally now. Brian Eno would have written them. I mean, basically... Yes! It's so true, though! Since the invention of computer art, there's an awful lot of music and paintings online which do exactly what The Unfortunate does,

which enable you to shuffle them round, view or listen to them in random or semi-random order, create works of art. And this is what Johnson was doing with paper. I mean, if I was staging plays, and thank thank god i'm not they should just do it in live just go straight away do it in a room in the actual in a room like the one which is basically a lot of people sat around an event in an old people's home they should get the actors to learn it and just do it live simultaneously yeah yeah yeah so you can wander wander from person to person. A bit like Rogue. Or just do it as a radio thing.

You know, just use stereo mixing and mix in and out. There was a radio play adaptation of Christy Mowry's own double entry when it was published. I think I've heard it, yeah. Have you heard it? Yeah, I'd love to hear it. He read it. He did. He did and...

Johnson read it. With a couple of voices. And there's a thing with Timothy West, which is, I think, down the Red Road, which is about, essentially, it's Mr Creosote ahead of his time. It's a man eating and his stomach rebelling. So we talked a lot about the experimental nature of what he did. I'd just love to read this very short thing

from the introduction of a collection of his non-fiction called Aren't You Rather Young To Be Writing Your Memoirs, in which he tries to just say why he writes. And I was thinking about this, and I was thinking, this is why anybody writes, really. I'll just read it. I think I write because I have something to say that I fail to say satisfactorily in conversation in person. Then there are things like conceit, stubbornness,

a desire to retaliate on those who have hurt me parallel by a desire to repay those who have helped me, a need to try and create something which may live after me, which I take to be the detritus of the religious feeling, the sheer technical joy of forcing almost intractable words

into patterns of meaning and form that are uniquely, for the moment at least, mine, a need to make people laugh with me in case they laugh at me, a desire to codify experience, to come to terms with things that have happened to me, and to try to tell the truth, to discover what is the truth about them. And I write especially to exorcise, to remove from myself, from my mind, the burden having to bear some pain,

the hurt of some experience, in order that it may be over there in a book and not here in my mind. I mean, that's brilliant, really. Yeah, yeah. As you say, what else really is there to say? But, unfortunately, we have Matthew. Well, I've got... Is there a link?

This episode I've got a genuinely tenuous literary link. And the genuinely tenuous literary link is that in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels there was a character called B.S. Johnson. Good God, no. It stands for It stands for Burgholt

Stutley Johnson or as he's better known, Bloody Stupid Johnson. Now, what I love about this is that there is absolutely no evidence that Terry Pratchett ever read B.S. Johnson. And actually, it's really, it's just a coincidence. What I also love about it is that if B.S. Johnson saw it, I know that he wouldn't think it was a coincidence. And he definitely, he definitely writes to Terry Pratchett

quoting Samuel Beckett saying how incredibly angry it made him that it was a bloody stupid Johnson, because he wasn't bloody stupid at all. The rest of the world was bloody stupid. He was also a great letter writer. I always imagine being B.S. Johnson's agent and just

shrinking. Agents, plural. It was a great risk to offend B.S. Johnson's agent and just shrinking. Agents, plural. It was a great risk to offend B.S. Johnson. If he was with us now, he'd basically be walking into people's houses with machine guns, getting rid of Giles Corran and other people who've criticised him over the years. There's this brilliant phrase from him referring to most other novelists who he called, quote, those Oxbridge bastards. Not only are your novels not as good as mine,

but you haven't even started. I mean, you know. He did have some serious chip, didn't he? I mean, he honestly believed he was doing something special, different, new, better, and didn't have a lot of truck with what he called the literary establishment. Although, it seems to me the literary establishment

seemed to quite like his stuff. Kermode calls him, refers to him in passing as, quote, a large and genially argumentative presence. He made a film about Samuel Johnson. One of the praises that he lays at Samuel Johnson's door is Samuel Johnson could win an argument with anyone. You know, the don to the heckler in a barge on the Thames. And I think Johnson is often arguing to convince not other people but himself.

He loves the idea of his own... He can certainly start an argument with anyone. Yeah. One of my favourite moments is that he talks about the concept of the human brain and the things that we can perceive. And he says, well, there are limits to human intelligence. And somebody's saying, well, what about aliens? He goes, aliens?

Yes, you're thinking of a dragon with six legs. There's something on those lines. It's just, yeah, he was feisty. And I think his consumption of alcohol did not diminish this in any way. Was he the literary equivalent of the footballer that Alex Ferguson said could start a fight in an empty room? I think Piers Johnson didn't even need a room.

He could start a fight with air. David, do you want to... I do indeed. ..bring it back to Christy Mowry for us, please? Yes, is this where I read? Yes. Yes, excellent. I'm going to read the whole damn thing.

This is chapter three. It is a Shandy-esque moment. Chapter three, Ave atque vale to Christie's mother. I won't explain anything at this point. Christie lived with his mother at this point near Hammersmith Bridge in the stump of Mall Road left out of the flyover and associated highway improvements. When he arrived home on this day,

time now being more or less continuous, his mother rose and welcomed him. Then she delivered herself of a statement thus, my son, I have for the purposes of this novel been your mother for the past 18 years and five months to the day if I assume your conception to have taken place after midnight. Now that you have had your great idea and are set upon your life's work, there is nothing further for me to do. Christy's mother paused, then continued. I do not complain. I have every reason to be satisfied with what I have done. I have cared for you without cosseting, cooked sensibly for you, without running risks from whatever disease was fashionably connected with food at each of several times. Those parts of my body, under taboos ruling over the last quarter of a century, have not been exposed to you since at least the age of three.

I have, husbandless, brought you up not to miss a father, without damaging what they would call your normality. I flatter myself that you are yourself, that you are both more and less than what I have made you, if that means anything. Nor have I let your character be moulded by such other men as I have allowed, for I am not a wooden block, to cross my path and enter in at the shrine of my womanhood.

The rather fanciful conceit is used to spare your blushes, Christy, for sons in general have to be over 30 before they can talk without embarrassment to their mothers about sexual matters. Or anything else I have sometimes... LAUGHTER ..in moments of cynicism thought. Again, the charming old lady paused, reflected and went on. I even allowed you to keep a pet, a cat,

in order to encourage some kind of loving in you, despite the fact that Austin inevitably meant more work for me in skinning and braising the mice and other small creatures he regularly brought in. Fortunately for you, Austin passed it over four months before the occasion of this statement I am at present making. So you are thus spared, Christy, the expense of having him put to sleep at the veterinary surgery.

But how I laughed when you first lisped, I do love pussy. Not a bug. I think I'll leave it there. Not a Bob. Now, one of the things about Christy Murray's own double entry, Dave, that I wanted to ask you, if you have a theory as to why Johnson does this,

at various points in the novel, he uses gratuitously long and obscure words. I've got a list of them here. Helmuthoid, Retropotent, Campaniform, Supplimination, Ungrace, Brachyuriate,

plus at least one, Excellutherosomise, which he seems to have made up, and when you Google it, comes up as used by B.S. Johnson in Christy Murray's own double entry. Why does he do that? I think he doesn't do it

for the will self reason of thinking of a word to show, look, I know a word. Yeah. That's Christy Murray's own double entry. Why does he do that? I think he doesn't do it for the will self reason of thinking of a word to show, look, I know a word. That's kind of a verbal tick. That's his catchphrase, like, can you hear me, mother? I think in the case of B.S. Johnson, what he's doing is, A, he's having fun, B, he knows that the literate reader will look it up. What he's doing, to be pretentious,

is he's taking you out of the book. You know that you're going to stop reading. Yeah, yeah. He's familiarising, isn't he? He's kind of doing that little, are you paying attention? What? And in fact, he does it with one word.

Instead of, you know, he does it in so many different ways. He does all the Brechtian thing, or the 18th century thing, in which Christie discovers. He does the thing we've just seen with his mum, saying I am now talking to you directly, the reader. But doing that with one word is fantastic. Yeah, I agree.

It's not to trick... And the fact that there is that joke that he's made up a word, which, you know, in the proper comedy rule of three, you have a real word, you look it up, a real word, you look it up, and then there's a word which doesn't exist. So you're like, oh, B.S. Johnson, I hate you. I love how in... I agree with you. There's that kind of shaking you out of the novel

by the single word and a kind of Brechtian thing. He even does the Brechtian thing in this novel by quoting Brecht. There's a way of breaking you out and reminding you this is a novel. That's a classic. I do know what Feffremdom's effect is, mate. Hedlund paused to provide a paragraph for resting the reader's eyes in what might otherwise have been a daunting mass of type.

That's just casually thrown in. It's exactly why I love that book, because to me it's exactly like The Goon Show. It's like an old radio where people go, so what are we going to do now? I don't know, let's look at the script. Yeah. It's the Bugs Bunny thing of running off the film. It's funny, isn't it?

At one end it's pointing back to Beckett's stories, and I always think of that, you know, God help us all, it's an easy death, it is not. After that brilliant piece you're reading, it just ends with, Christy's mother died. No further elaboration needed. But then it's also looking forward to, definitely looking forward to, sort of Python-type humour.

I mean, I think the humour of it is the thing that I think people like ourselves probably respond to in the first instance. I read Albert Angelo actually quite recently. I just thought it was really funny. I mean, it was obviously all these other things as well. It's a brilliant experimental novel. It is a depiction of life as a teacher in the early to mid-1960s.

Also, it's got a lot of very good jokes in it. And he doesn't pull his punches on the jokes. I mean, David, you write comedy, you know this. I think the uniqueness of Johnson, outside the experimental, or whatever you want to call it, thing, is this brilliant combination of being very funny and very bleak. That this is, you know, housemother normal

is something that couldn't be filmed, could possibly be filmed now, but very unlikely. Christy Mowry, if done properly, is a very, very sad book. The last page is just, it's a flipping whited sepulchre. It's just a skull on a hill, is what it is. And it's that brilliant bleakness.

But this book skips along. It's like a lamb that turns out to be dead. And there was a film made about 15 years ago of Christy Mowry's own double-entry. It's divided opinion because it's quite... I hate to use the phrase, but parts of it are excellent. I really like the soundtrack, I really like the performances. The very short version is that there are scenes which are set for reasons I don't understand, except possibly funding, in Renaissance Italy.

That's correct. These scenes do not, for me... They're very lavish. These scenes do not for me work. How do they squeeze that in? Vaguely to do with the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping. Oh, right. Yeah. Who was a Renaissance Italian. They don't, in my opinion, don't add anything.

The scenes in modern London, he actually has done, Paul Tickell, try not to sound patronising because it's a good job of work, he's made a 90s version of Christy Mowry. The factory scenes are great, Neil Stoop's great, the lead's great. It's really well done. But it could have been done as a good naturalistic film. If I'd done it, it would be great.

I think the problem with the film is, for reasons that are perfectly understandable, they're trying to take from the book... In theory, you could say the novel Christy Mowry's own double entry is a novel about terrorism. And they try and make a film that is that novel. But, of course, it isn't really a novel about terrorism. It's a novel about novels and ideas and B.S. Johnson and comedy

and all those other things. It's very hard to make that play. And there's no element in the film of saying to you, this is a film. So there's no kind of Johnsonian postmodern element in it at all. When I read Christy Mowry, the only afterwards you think, oh, hang on, he's just performed an appalling act. You're kind of shocked, but you're just like, OK, he's done that.

Because it fits his argument. Yeah, yeah. You're inside his head and then you're kind of shocked, but you're just like okay, he's done that, because it kind of fits his argument you're inside his head if you film Christy Mowry as a book about terrorism it should be from the POV of a terrorist, who's also a nutter, he's not a political terrorist in the end, Christy Mowry's a sociopath

he represents the side of B.S. Johnson which is basically, I'd like all the critics and the other authors dead. And the documentary book, I just love... He's a genius. He's not above really crap. It just made me laugh a lot when one of the characters says, would you credit it?

And he says, I'd have to think about that. I think the thing is, that joke's really... I've never thought of that before. It's a great joke. And you know what he does? He does it three times in the book. So the third time you're going, ah. Yeah, see what he did there.

There's also the running joke of the butcher bird, the shrike. You may not know, but some readers may and some won't. When it was being translated into Dutch, I was part of a B.S. Johnson internet group, and the Dutch translator wrote to him and said, can anyone explain why Christie's girlfriend is called the Shrike?

The answer is because she works in a... Well, spoil it for the world. She works in a butcher's shop. She is a bird in Cockney rhyming slang, and a butcher bird is the Shrike. The Shrike is an animal that I believe lets its prey, hangs up its prey. Yeah, it impels them on a spike. Basically, the butcher bird, they hang there so it can eat them later,

and they often aren't dead by the time they eat them. It took me a long time to find this out. It's a very involved joke. It has nothing to do with the shrike's character, which has to be said is minimally written. And when you think of... Shaving fan.

That's another reason I enjoyed the book when I was 16. I'd never heard of this practice. It's funny, it's the first time I was introduced to it as well. It's always got this great scene where you get to shave every hair off a bird's body. And the best thing is, it's relevant to the story. Yeah.

It's a perfect narrative device, for it is shaving foam that hastens the untimeliness of it all. Who would have thought? David, was Christy Mowry, when you came to write your own fiction, I have to say, having not finished The Mule that long ago... No one has. Oh, I see. Yeah. Whether he was... He's one of those voices in your head when you're writing.

I think he's too good to be... I think there's a dryness of tone that he has that nobody else has. But I think it's just a kind of mulch of comedy, just confirmed aspects of comedy. If I could write anything like B.S. Johnson, I'd be a very happy man.

I think that sense of humour is inside me because of reading that at such an early age. Have you got any more tenuous links, Matthew? Yes, I have. So I've got a tenuous link for us to go out on. And there are two, actually. I've got one I thought this week I'd try and get a

tenuous link to John and to Andy. And I found one, actually. It was relatively easy to find one for both of you relatively easy I like that so go on so John I'm going to tell you what yours is because I think you probably know a little bit about it already which is that two weeks before he died B.S. Johnson went for a drink in the Falkland Arms which is your local pub it is my local pub yeah and why did what do you think he was doing there? Well, he was staying with a mutual friend of ours, a guy called Peter Buckman, who was in... Takes the other book off the desk.

Peter was a publisher but also a writer. He'd written one novel called Playground, but he was a great friend of B.S. Johnson's and he lives in Little Chew, which is the next village to Great Chew, which is where I live and where the Falkland Arms is and when Jonathan Coe was writing his biography Like a Fiery Elephant he came and

stayed in the pub as well because he was interviewing Peter about B.S. Johnson so yeah that's my link So for Andy Matt have you got a little bit of a prompt here that we can give him just to start this off So do you recognise this Andy?

It's the Kinks It's Victoria by the Kinks Well it's a version of Victoria by the Kinks The Falls So this is the a version of Victoria by the Kinks. It's The Fools. The Fools, Victoria. OK, so this is The Fools' version of Victoria. That is easy. So, um... We've reached peak Miller.

Yeah, go on. And The Fools. This is peak Miller, basically. So what is the connection between the writer Andy Miller, the Kinks, and B.S. Johnson, bearing in mind that you've written a book about the Kinks? I wrote a book about the Village Green Preservation Society LP. Yeah, it's not that LP. It's a different LP. But you did write about the King, so you should...

I'd be surprised if you... I'd be surprised if you didn't know this. Disappointed, I suppose, would be the word. All right. Can you tell... Yeah, you can tell John what it is, though, right? A bit harsh? Well, go on, Andy.

You've had... There's a record... Well, I don't know, Matthew, but there is a record by the Pernice brothers called B.S. Johnson. Is there? Yeah, and very nice, it is too. It's not that, it's actually something to do with Victoria, so the song Victoria is the opening track on...

Arthur, or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, by the Kings. And Arthur is based on... Do you know what it's based on? It's based on... It's based on Ray Davis's brother-in-law. And it's based on a play that was written by Ray Davis and... Julian... Julian Mitchell. Julian Mitchell, that's right.

And Julian Mitchell is one of the writers that contributed to that book on the other side of the table, London Contributors. Oh, there you go! That is so tenuous. I mean... I tried to explain this to my colleague Phil, how tenuous this thing was

earlier in the week, and literally his eyes glazed over about five seconds, completely lost. But there you have it. I'm just waking up now to be honest. You're right, I'm disappointed I didn't get that though, Matthew. It's a quite interesting set of writers on the back of this book. I mean, there's some that are probably less well-remembered than others,

but Eva Fidges, I suppose, is still remembered. Wilson Harris, from Novelist. Rainer Heppelstall, not really remembered at all, but interesting. Olivia Manning, and then Adrian Mitchell and Julian Mitchell. Piers Paul Reid, but Melvin Bragg certainly is. And Julian Mitchell's best known, in fact, now, for his work on Inspector Morse

really as was Peter Buckman also wrote Inspector Morse if only B.S. Johnson had written Inspector Morse why are we here you're pointless

yes you can see him being a really I know who the murderer is but it doesn't matter because it's all made up all is chaos good cop bad cop Yes, you can see him being a really, really... I know who the murderer is, but it doesn't matter. Because it's all made up. All is chaos. All is chaos and made up. Lewis interrogates Morse, comes in,

oh, I'll call this lying. Right. Well, on that happy bombshell, it's probably time to wind up. Thank you very much, David, for coming in and sharing your courage and love of B.S. Johnson and to Matthew obviously for a link more tenuous than any we've

hitherto had. This is Backlisted at BacklistedPod on Twitter. Do go there to follow us or Backlisted podcast on Facebook and we'll see you all again next time. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon.

It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.