Reader, you should read this if you want to be a good reader.

First of all, I want to say thank you to Mister [a:Luke Haines|2618249|Luke Haines|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg]. He mentioned Christie Malry during an interview and concert at the Southbank Centre last summer (which summer I mean you'll have to find out yourself if your interested at all). Later I also read a book by Mister Haynes, called [b:Post Everything: Outsider Rock and Roll|13578580|Post Everything Outsider Rock and Roll|Luke Haines|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1333581642s/13578580.jpg|19162143]. In this book he luckily mentioned Mr. Malry again, because I had forgotten to write it down.

Christie Malry is funny, weird and devoid of any empathy, or actually full of it. Christie's live sucks and to make it even worse it is entirely not clear if he exists at all.

So [a:Jonathan Coe|19916|Jonathan Coe|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1233589818p2/19916.jpg], I recognized your writings in this bewildering little work of fiction. [b:The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim|7419758|The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim|Jonathan Coe|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327440360s/7419758.jpg|9369061] No wonder you wrote a whole book on B.S. Johnson.
[b:Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson|90989|Like a Fiery Elephant The Story of B.S. Johnson|Jonathan Coe|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327941320s/90989.jpg|871001]

This is not a review, just some unorganized information I wanted to share. My tooth is nagging me.

My tooth, the one that's gone, actually wrote this review.

A phanthom review, thank you tooth at last you did something nice! ( )

The novelist B. S. Johnson was deeply distrustful of the imagination, taking the Platonic view that ‘telling stories is telling lies’. And Johnson thought that telling lies was morally wrong. All very well for philosophers, but a position bound to make life a bit tricky for a novelist, you would have thought. He was part of a loose group of experimental 1960s British writers which also included Ann Quinn, Eva Figes, Christine Brooke-Rose and Alan Burns. Except that Johnson was emphatic his novels were not experimental, explaining that although he made experiments, his published books were fully achieved work (well, many people do seem to regard the term ‘experimental novel’ as a euphemism for failure). Although passionate about the form and its possibilities, he didn’t have much time for most contemporary novels and his literary heroes were idiosyncratic ones: Sterne, Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien. Despite his ethical distaste for stories he had a rare gift for telling them, as this brutally funny shaggy dog story demonstrates.

Christy Malry is a young working class man who works in a confectionery factory as an accounts clerk and decides to take night classes to train as an accountant. He learns double-entry bookkeeping with its golden rule-: ‘Every debit must have its credit’. Highly impressed, Christie decides to base his life on this principle and devises his own system of moral double-entry bookkeeping: whenever society commits an offence against him he will take proportionate action to balance the books. Initially, this involves little more than a bit of petty pilfering and harmless insubordination to right wrongs perpetrated against him by managers in the factory. As he becomes more aware of the sheer injustice of society, however, his attempts to balance the books lead him inexorably towards much more serious, darker and deadly actions.

Christie Malry, like most of Johnson’s novels, draws on his own experience. He worked as an accounts clerk in a bakery in the fifties and, like Christie, was from a working class background in Hammersmith. It’s also evocative of Britain in the early seventies - a time of political and industrial conflict and terrorist bombs - with Christie as a one-man Angry Brigade. Rather like Candide, it combines a bleak vision with an insouciant and high-spirited narrative tone. Johnson paints with broad comic brushstrokes and is very, very funny. He subverts his own narrative, throwing formalistic spanners into the works with gleeful abandon. He addresses the reader directly and indulges in undisguised political polemic. The characters are fully aware that they are fictional and, at one point, Christie and Johnson have a conversation about the novel Christie is in and The Novel in general. He reproduces some pages from Christie’s account books which convey his steadily increasing fury (debit column: ‘Socialism not given a chance, 40,734’).

Johnson litters his text with ridiculous and ridiculously abstruse words: exeleutherostomise, incunabula, trituration, ventripotent, sufflamination, vermifuge. Anthony Burgess, who admired Johnson’s novels, used to do much the same thing. With Burgess it always seemed like a deadly earnest and vaguely unpleasant attempt to overwhelm the reader with his erudition, but with Johnson, perhaps because his approach is more extreme and he uses even longer long words than Burgess did, the effect is of a wilfully perverse joke that he is playing with (not on) the reader.

Johnson’s theories about the novel were dogmatic and simplistic. His practice, however, was more complex. In this novel he does indeed tell a story and creates vivid characters. His constant exposure of the fictive nature of his own creation somehow has the paradoxical effect of making it seem more real and thrillingly alive than most naturalistic fiction. It crackles with energy and is compulsively readable and entertaining. Behind its playful surface this book is powered by strong emotions of anger and despair and, in addition to being hilarious, it’s also strangely moving. At about 20,000 words Christie Malry has more ideas and invention in it than many novels twice its length: black comedy, social satire, an unconventional thriller, formal innovation and erotic romance (how could I have forgotten to mention Christie’s girlfriend, the Shrike?).

All this and a highly unusual use of shaving foam. ( )

Christie Malry es un joven humilde que ambiciona estar cerca del dinero del que carece. Por ello acepta empezar a trabajar como empleado bancario, pero el ambiente gris y asfixiante pronto le convencerá de que debe buscar nuevos escenarios en los que perseguir sus objetivos. Hacerse contable, su siguiente movimiento, no le acercará más al éxito, pero sí le hará descubrir la herramienta esencial para alumbrar la Gran Idea que dará sentido a su existencia: la contabilidad por partida doble, que Christie adoptará para hacer, literalmente, balance de daños y beneficios en su relación cada vez más turbulenta con un mundo que percibe injusto y despiadado, y contra el que se declara en guerra abierta.

Bryan Stanley Johnson himself disliked the term ‘experimental’ which is often used to describe his novels, but how else do you describe them? One is printed with holes in a couple of its pages, through which readers catch glimpses—like premonitions—of what’s about to happen next. Another is written in twenty-seven sections, twenty-five of which can be shuffled and read in any order, allowing you to reread a different book each time. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, the last to be published during Johnson’s lifetime, is among the least experimental though.
   It draws on his own experiences as a young man not long out of school, in Hammersmith, west London, during the 1950s. Christie, eighteen years old and working as a junior invoice clerk for a company making sweets and cakes, discovers something which will transform his life: double-entry bookkeeping. A lightbulb goes on over his head: every Debit must have its Credit, not just in accounting but in life itself—a balancing and setting straight of things, a righting of wrongs. Wrongs done to Christie by the world that is. Justice, in other words. And revenge. His balancing of life’s books starts off with some relatively trivial entries: annoying junkmail on the doormat at home (Debit) is balanced by posting the wretched stuff back (Credit); the overbearing rudeness of his work supervisor (Debit) is balanced by sabotaging the firm’s incoming mail (Credit). Every so often he draws up a proper balance sheet, and five of these are included in the book. Things quickly escalate though—and the first time Christie kills people, his justification is that he’s Crediting himself for the way society treats people like him: ‘If they fight dirty (and they do), so shall I; if they are so callous about human life, then so shall I be (though I could not possibly kill as many as they do).’ The question, of course, is how will it all end—will there be a final settling up of Christie’s account?
   Several things about the author himself became plain—how much he liked women for instance. I don’t mean sex, he clearly just found women particularly likeable as people: Christie’s mother is beautifully described; and most striking of all is his girlfriend, nicknamed The Shrike (she’s a bird who works in a butcher’s). There’s anger in this book too and, although I liked it a lot, at times did find myself wondering about the author’s state of mind while writing it. Often depressed by the lack of recognition for his work, he committed suicide (his career as an author cut short at the age of just forty) only months after Double-Entry was published. ( )

In what would be his last book to be published in his lifetime, Johnson deliberately goes back to the early days of English fiction, with jokey chapter summaries — "Chapter XX: Not the Longest Chapter in this Novel" turns out to be only three lines long — and both the narrator and the characters repeatedly remind us that we are in a work of fiction. When asked by his supervisor why he had arranged his mother's funeral so soon after her death, Christie replies "There wasn't any more time. This is a very short novel." At times, the characters stop off to argue with the author — 'you shouldn't be bloody writing novels about it, you should be out there bloody doing something about it' — and at other times the narrator insists to us that there is no independent reality they exist in. If it were only a few hundred pages longer and set in Yorkshire, it would be Tristram Shandy.

But the central structural device of the book goes even further back than that: office-worker Christie Malry reviews his success or failure in life by means of a balance-sheet, just as Robinson Crusoe did. But he takes it a few notches further: where Crusoe used the balance-sheet to demonstrate to himself, against all reason and common-sense, that he was relatively fortunate and should be content with what Fate had delivered, Christie's balance-sheet consistently shows that his account with "Them" is in debit. He tries to resolve this by contriving acts of revenge — against his employers, the state, the world, the universe — that gradually escalate from minor acts of office sabotage (an order for "5 cartons of carbon paper" modified to read "5 tons...") to large-scale acts of terrorism. The latter probably aren't quite as funny now as they were in 1973, when bomb-scares were still something of an amusing novelty for most of us, but it's pretty clear that this isn't a novel that's meant to be read realistically.

As usual, there's a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle wit, a good deal of entertaining sex, and some learned references (lots of citations from Brecht and from Luca Pacioli, the "father of book-keeping", but also an epigraph from Széll Zsuzsa, a literary critic so impressively obscure that he still only has Wikipedia pages in Hungarian and Esperanto!). Great fun! ( )