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Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry

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BS Johnson is one of those experimental writers, controversial during their lives that subsequently vanishes from print. Johnson was a journalist, a socialist, and a fine novelist. Best known for The Unfortunates (his book in a box where every chapter is separately bound and the reader is invited to read them in any order he or she wishes), Christie Malry's Own Double Entry is perhaps his most accessible novel.

However, this "accessibility" is in the midst of a studiedly experimental text. This is a corruscating satire in which Johnson targets one of the symbols of capitalism, the double entry system. The very basis of accountancy, and the manipulation of finance, Johnson turns this building block on its head as his central character, Christie Malry, a young man with a future, decides that he will live his life accoridng to the principles of double entry.

Johnson's novel has acute observations on a variety of issues in British life that still merit comment. How working class people come to vote conservative, the manner in which people's worth is measured financially; and all of this is in the midst of an angry satire where Malry wreaks vengeance on the system. It is a bitter cycnical novel, with a dark wit.

There is love, sex, and death; and an unusual use for shaving foam. And all of this is presented in a slightly distant way, where Johnson continually turns to the reader and winks, letting you know this is a novel. Characters are aware of their place in fiction, and Johnson deconstructs the novel to let you see how it works.

This description may be off putting, but this is classy fiction. It is funny, and angry. I enjoyed this work, but preferred Johnson's The Unfortunates; which I feel has more depth, and more humanity.

If you enjoyed this you may like Graham Greene's Dr Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party or Michael Dibdin's Dirty Tricks (a Thatcherite satire).

I read Christie Malry's Own Double Entry when I was about 15 - I got it from the local library as it is generally out of print in the UK, a tribute to British library services in the 1970s and no tribute to British publishing at any time - and I had never, and still haven't ever, read anything like it. Its "experimental" qualities - distancing, irony, the extraordinary ending - descend from Laurence Sterne and all that but Johnson's tone - political, cynical and above all very funny - was all his own. Christie Malry should have been the first in a line of great novels instead of the last. With luck, Johnson fan and influencee Jonathan Coe's forthcoming biog and the reprint of The Unfortunates should see a mass reprint of Johnson's work that will overwhelm the cack-faced sludge of manky novels about people with trust funds pretending to be interesting in West London.

David Quantick, London March 6 1999

This is a small gem of a book by an underappreciated writer (1933-73). The short novel centers around a simple man who decides to live his life according to the principles of Double-Entry Bookkeeping, which he adapts in startling ways to settle his accounts with society. Johnson liked to experiment with fictional forms; here, as in his handful of other works, he plays games with the reader, mocking and fragmenting the traditional novel. That sort of thing can easily drop into post-modernist preciousness, but the book is redeemed by Johnson's mordant, unsparing wit. The book's back cover even includes praise from the notoriously exacting Samuel Beckett. I hope you'll agree with Sam and me that this is a wonderfully comic book.

Although those interested in experimental British novelist B.S. Johnson, who killed himself at the age of 40 in 1973, should probably begin reading this enigmatic writer with his second novel Albert Angelo, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry is an imaginative black-comic tale of a bookkeeper's effort to take revenge on society for all perceived and real slights. The double-entry book described by the title is quite literal and its pages show up frequently throughout the book. The novel contains some of Johnson's most spirited comic writing and is a quick read (it can be read in two or three hours) once you know the main conceit--that of Christie's entry book and the bizarre nature of his entries. Oddly enough, this strange but wonderful novel might offer insight into a certain kind of terrorist mind--the Unabomber comes to mind. Incidentally, there's a wonderful new biography of B.S. Johnson by Jonathan Coe called Fiery Elephant. You might look there for further information and analysis of this wicked and fun novel. Some "tricks" used by Johnson in his other novels seem thin forty years later--The Unfortunates is a box novel and readers are encouraged to shuffle the chapters (with the exception of first and last)and read them in random order; Albert Angelo has a cut-out on the bottom of several pages ostensibly to let reader's see ahead to the future (on page 152!!!)--though Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry holds up rather nicely. Still I wish this very talented writer had spent less time coming up with sometimes dubious formal innovation (dubious not because they are insincere but because other authors seem to have beat BSJ to the punch)and just given us more of his often splendid wit and prose.

This book felt like somewhere between an argumentative essay on the state of fiction and an actual story - but it was wound wondefully together. Managed to make me laugh out loud a few times, which I don't do very often when reading books; mostly because the author managed to twist things so violently away from what I was expecting to read.

Very self-referential, but somehow gets away with it completely. Original idea to write about, and an nteresting style of writing that made me want to go and discover more of his work.

Witty, engaging and experimental at its best: Christie Malry is caught in the constancy and unalleviating sameness of a job for life in an accounts department for a bakery (I do know a few people right now who would LOVE that security and stability). Unable to cope with the droning monotone of predictability and perceived slights of just about everyone around him: his boss, the Inland revenue, and eventually humanity in general, he embarks on a double entry mode of operation, whereby each injustice is `avenged' by an increasing number of casualties: towards the end of the book the corpse count becomes rather high. I'm not sure this wanton killing appeals so much, but in as much as Christie gets his comeuppance at the end, perhaps its a form of natural justice at work.
All this is set in experimental mode : the author tells us early on he isn't going to be writing a long novel, so events and characters need to be expedited accordingly. Therefore Christie's mother is dispatched in chapter two to meet this requirement, Christie's own job transfers happen just because we need him to be at a certain place in order to acquire dynamite, and so on. At one point the author even discourses with Christie telling him he needs to wrap up the novel. In the next chapter, he does, and Christie duly expires of cancer.
The double entry, illustrated throughout the book, is in fact misleading, but then this is literature and not accounting, so I won't gloss over the fact that Liabilities were omitted from the equation. As long as we're having fun, right?

B.S. Johnson is the most important writer you've never heard of. read his books, learn the truth you little cryptorchid.