Christie Malry's Own Double Entry - Hardcover

Johnson, B. S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002211319 ISBN 13: 9780002211314

Publisher: HarperCollins Distribution Services, 1973

Synopsis

Christie Malry is a simple person. Born into a family without money, he realised early along in the game that the best way to come by money was to place himself next to it. So he took a job as a very junior bank clerk in a very stuffy bank. It was at the bank that Christie discocered the principles of double-entry bookkeeping, from which he evolved his Great Idea. For every offence Christy henceforth received at the hands of a society with which he was clearly out of step, a debit must be noted; after which, society would have to be paid back appropriately, so that the paper credit would accrue to Christy's account.

Now made into a film starring Nick Moran of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels fame.

Acerbic yet funny, this is a novel which, even as it provokes laughter, will alarm and disturb as well.

'A most gifted writer' Samuel Beckett

'The future of the novel depends on people like B.S. Johnson' Anthony Burgess

'Mr. Johnson has undoubtedly written a masterpiece' Auberon Waugh

'Delightful to read, highly amusing, and clever' Daily Telegraph

About this title

Review:

Beautifully constructed, funny and poignant, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry is regarded as B.S. Johnson's most humorous book but it is a dark, sly humour predicated on the distaste Johnson had for an oppressive post-war British society (an oppression he delineates brilliantly in The Unfortunates).

Christie is, we are told, a simple man, who works in a bank alongside, but excluded from, money. He moves from the bank to learn Double-Entry Bookkeeping in a firm called Tappers, where his disillusionment deepens leading to his Great Idea: he decides to use the principles of Double-Entry (an Aggravation column for offences caused to him, a Recompense column detailing his revenge) to settle his accounts with society.

Johnson (1933-1973), a forgotten hero of the British avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s (he committed suicide when he was not yet 40), wrote seven wonderful novels that echo Joyce and Beckett in their intelligence, inventiveness and genius for language. The books, full of the kind of typographical innovations so beloved of the concrete poets, have been largely ignored since Johnson killed himself but more than deserve to be looked at again; writers as skilled as Johnson are very few and far between indeed. --Mark Thwaite

Review:

‘Delightful to read, highly amusing, and clever’ Daily Telegraph

‘Johnson has undoubtedly written a masterpiece’ Auberon Waugh

‘The most accessible, exuberant and despairing of all his works’ John Lanchester

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins Distribution Services
• Publication date: 1973
• ISBN 10: 0002211319
• ISBN 13: 9780002211314
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192