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Johnson, Bryan Stanley 1933-1973.
Novelist.
Born
in London, Johnson campaigned vigorously throughout his short writing
life (he committed suicide at 39) for a renaissance of technical
innovation and experimentation in the English novel. His own fiction
demonstrates his admiration for Joyce, Beckett and Flann O'Brien in its
deliberate abjuration of realistic homogeneity and for Sterne in its
playfulness with the physical form of the novel. Albert Angelo (1964)
contains a hole in page 149 which is later revealed to represent the
knife-cut which killed Christopher Marlowe, and is also offered as the
chance to read the future (on a subsequent page) through the past (a
previous page). Johnson himself intrudes into Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (1973) to converse with the book's hero, while The Unfortunates (1969)
is notorious for being published in a box of 27 loose-leaf sections to
be shuffled and read in any order, to embody in literal reading terms
the haphazard, unreliable recollections of the narrator. Other novels
include Travelling People (1964), Trawl (1966) and See the Old Lady Decently (1975).
The extremity of Johnson's technical adventures, which have
occasionally earned him the charge of gimmickry, may be seen as
acknowledgement of the immense task of reversing the realistic bias of
post-war British fiction.
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