The Unfortunates

[moultery]

I read B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates from end to end today. I can recommend it. Johnson was known for formal conceits, like cutting holes in pages to give you glimpses of future pages, or telling the same events repeatedly in page-for-page ‘real time’ from several characters' perspectives. This is a memoir-novel consisting of twenty-seven unbound sections in a box; to be read, apart from the first and last, in random order. It's a gimmick, but not gimmicky. I first came to Johnson for his formal strategies, but I've come to appreciate how (unlike many modernist authors) they grow unobtrusively out of their content. Here, Johnson is passing time in Nottingham as he waits for the football match he's covering for the Observer to begin, sifting as he does his memories of the place, particularly those of a close friend from there lost to cancer. The arbitrary order of the prose fragments gives the sense of stumbling across things when wandering a town, and of memories bubbling up unwontedly. And his idiosyncratic punctuation gives the rhythm of a mind in grief, with gaps on the page as he pauses blankly, and sentences that fall silent without a full stop. He strove for candour above all else (‘fuck all this LYING’, as one memorable outburst puts it), to the point that most of his so-called fiction is strictly autobiographical. I think many would find it self-absorbed, but to me it rings true.

(As an aside, I wonder what formal innovations are possible in fiction now that we read so much on portable electronic devices. (A box of loose sections is definitely not portable!) I would like to think that, when a book can be an app, the sky is the limit. Randomisation would be trivial. How about books that are aware of your surroundings as you read? Books that update according to current events? A revival of honest-to-goodness interactive fiction? But I doubt there's enough appetite to justify the development costs. Perhaps it shows what heady times the sixties and seventies were that Johnson's work was published.)