Review of Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry
Times Literary Supplement, 9 February 1973
"Who wants long novels anyway?" asks B.S. Johnson's hero, Christie in
a dialogue with his intervening creator near the end of this very short
book. "Why spend all your spare time for a month reading a thousand-page
novel when you can have a comparable aesthetic experience in the theatre
or cinema in only one evening?" Several questions, obviously, are begged
or evaded here. Many of Mr Johnsons' contemporaries still cheerfully persist
in writing longish novels (if not of 1,000 pages) which seem somehow to
get published, read and esteemed: the genre is a long time dying. And
then some of those experiences in the theatre and cinema may possess a
degree of elaborateness, a resonance, or even a persuasiveness, which
some experimental novels, "funny, brutalist and short" in Christie/Johnson's
words, may not have. By about this point in his new book one is concluding
regretfully that Mr Johnson's best defence of his minimalist techniques
might lie rather in the writing of better novels, in this form or another
form, than in such slyly self-excusing interventions.
As so often with this gifted, ingenious, amusing—and frustrating—writer's
work, the better novel does, indeed, seem to lie somewhere just round
a corner which he doctrinally refuses to turn. Christie Malry is,
once again, the substance of a good idea tricked out with devices to fill
a very odd book, rather than developed with care and stamina to make a
good one. There is, for a start, the appealing central idea: Christie
will mark up something on the personal credit side of his double-entry
for everything which the world, in its malice, debits from him; irritations
and evils he suffers will be revenged by damage done to society in return.
It's the stuff of a shrewd psychological study, with scope for much incidental
satire; practitioners of black comedy among American novelists could have
made it work. But Mr Johnson's devotion to the short novel, and the arbitrary
manipulation of characters and happenings on a strictly non-realistic,
resolutely anti-novel, level (despite the patent, indeed loving, realism
of his settings), means that it all evaporates in knockabout fantasy almost
as soon as it has started. Stealing stationery escalates into blowing
up a tax office (killing seven) and poisoning a reservoir (killing 20,000).
This is to tire of invention, not to revel in it, or vary it. When the
book has to end, with Christie having to die, the hero cooperates with
his author in developing a sudden cancer in a way no less forced, unsatisfactory
and silly for his creator's happy admission that it is so. Denigrating
your own art must in some whit enhance it: the trailing off into blank
pages here suggests nothing more original than mere loss of interest in
continuing.
Embedded in Mr Johnson's tiny chapters are, as one would expect, those
little nuggets of unquestionable talent which one hopes some time to see
piled all together in a book which—dare one say it?—eschews
gimmickry in favour of ambition, and scale. There is the usual pleasing
sense of place—here, the peculiar urban desolation of sub-fly-over
Hammersmith. There is some successful broad comedy (as well as some strained
slapstick). There are the beginnings of some developed characterization
which the author has clearly enjoyed—office and factory skivers and
time-servers—though it all gets cut off fairly quickly. There are,
especially, scenes in a factory, looking at industrial processes, where
Mr Johnson has stopped, looked, thought, and used his admirably accurate
and flexible prose (one remembers school interiors in Albert Angelo, shipboard
scenes in Trawl); but not for long. In the last analysis, the tribute
one makes to Mr Johnson, who has yet again obscured his abilities in a
gauze of facetious devices, is that one finishes his novel wanting more
of everything in it that even remotely begins to extend him. Unhappily,
at least while he is set on his present course, it is likely to be the
last tribute he actually wants.