The British novelist B.S. Johnson believed that ‘telling stories is telling lies’ so, instead of making things up, he tried to tell the truth about his life in the form of the novel. His autobiographical novels are usually described as experimental but this was something he firmly rejected maintaining that, although he made experiments, his published writing was fully realised work and not ‘experimental’ at all.

Albert Angelo, published in 1964, was Johnson’s second novel and the first one he felt came close to achieving his aims: ‘I broke through the English disease of the objective correlative to speak truth directly if solipsistically in the novel form, and heard my own small voice’. It’s based on Johnson’s experiences as a supply teacher in various state schools in North London in the early ‘60s. Albert, a would-be architect forced into teaching to make a living, drifts around the city with his friend Terry and obsesses over a former relationship with a girlfriend. Albert’s pupils become increasingly aggressive and the reader gradually realises that they seem to have a very nasty surprise in store for him.

Johnson may have been a depressive, he committed suicide in 1973 at the age of forty, but he knew how to enjoy himself when writing a novel. Architect Albert studies the form of buildings and Johnson plays with the form of the novel: he punches a rectangular hole into the page enabling the reader to see a future event, divides pages into two columns so we can read both Albert’s speech and thoughts as he gives his class a disastrous geology lesson and scatters essays by Albert’s pupils throughout the text. When Albert finds a fortuneteller’s card in the street Johnson, instead of describing it, simply reproduces the card. He breaks into poetry, switches between first-person, second-person and third-person narrative, dramatic dialogue and internal monologue.

Enjoyable though these formal innovations are, what makes Albert Angelo a great novel rather than merely an ingeniously entertaining one, are other qualities entirely. This book is thrillingly alive in a way that the general run of novels, even perfectly competent ones, simply aren’t. Johnson captures the chaos of life as it is actually lived rather than as it is lived in fiction and writes with unusual passion and an abrasive humanity. He is also extremely funny in a Beckettian sort of way and, in amongst the anger, there are some beautifully tender lyrical passages.

You get a vivid sense of London, the working class London Johnson knew so well and that was disappearing even as he chronicled it; a world of spit-and-sawdust pubs, bustling street markets, Saturday football matches and seedy late-night cafes. Stylistic games aside, for most of its length Albert Angelo has much in common with the British social realist fiction of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s with its artistically inclined anti-hero kicking against the pricks of a repressive and philistine society. It certainly paints a damming portrait of the English education system of the time (and has anything really changed?). Then, on page 163, B.S. Johnson himself suddenly and dramatically bursts into his own novel and with the immortal sentence ‘OH, FUCK ALL THIS LYING!’ demolishes the entire elaborate artifice he has constructed. Throwing aside the mask of novelist he proceeds to speak directly, in anguished and urgent tones, about his own preoccupations and the deceptions he has perpetrated on the reader in the course of the novel.

This is a short book and a quick read; an easy read, in fact, but one whose multilayered nature and anarchic humour combined with deep moral seriousness rewards endless rereading. In his polemical essay ‘Aren’t You Rather Young To Be Writing Your Memoirs?’ - one of the last things he ever wrote - Johnson compiled a list of contemporaries who he felt were ‘writing as though it mattered, as though they meant it, as though they meant it to matter’; in Albert Angelo he did precisely that. ( )

3.5 stars

i'll definitely say that the david mitchell who was referenced in stephen m's (very nicely done) review was not the david mitchell i was expecting to be referenced, which is certainly not a bad thing ( )

Bryan Stanley Johnson regarded conventional fiction—creating characters, making up dialogue—as a form of lying and strove to be as truthful in his novels, to reproduce the real world as faithfully, as he could manage. The result, strangely enough, are books which are some of the oddest you’ll read.
   This one, set in Johnson’s own early-1960s London, is about a young man who thinks of himself as an architect while actually earning his living (as Johnson himself had done) as a supply teacher. It’s a fragmentary existence (the first week Albert teaches in three different schools) and, some of it, very funny. Johnson builds this picture up, though, in a variety of ways: there’s a chunk written first-person, another done third-person, then something else again (not sure what). There’s a stretch where each page is divided vertically in two, down the right half Albert’s internal monologue as he gives a shambolic geology lesson to an unruly class of kids, while down the left we have what is happening in the classroom at the same time. Then there’s internal monologue alone as Albert fritters away a public holiday on a pub-crawl instead of working at his architect’s drawing board as he’d promised himself. There’s a debate with another teacher (about the way Cockney children speak: ain’t for is not, lorst for lost and so on) followed by a series of school essays, the result of telling his pupils to write what they think about him. Near the end Johnson himself simply elbows his main character aside altogether with the words, “Oh, f**k all this LYING” and tells us what he’s been trying to write here, about himself as an author and his views on writing in general.
   Oh yes, and what about those holes? This is the novel originally published with holes in a couple of its pages, lined up to give the reader a premonition—or a sort of premonition—of how the book itself will end. My 1987 edition, rather than actual holes, had spaces which you could cut out for yourself (which of course I did). ( )

Reading Albert Angelo after having passed up the chance to do so around the time it came out, when friends were laughing aloud as they read it, was a confused experience: it would have been easier to enjoy when B.S. Johnson was alive, which is not at all to say that it's not very funny and unsettling now. The teaching experience calls to mind Stephen Dedalus' feelings of hopelessness in chapter two of Ulysses, transposed into multi-cultural London schools 75 years later.

B.S. Johnson left only a few works: I will be reading them all.