Write Out Loud (Reviews and Writing)

I came across this most unusual book thanks to Interesting Literature, a literary site that used to be fantastic but then the curator seemed to shut down from life and stopped interacting with his readers. At that point I gave up. Nevertheless, the site has a plethora of fascinating article about anything and everything to do with literature – including reviews of oddities like Johnson’s book.

It sounded exactly my kind of book: literary and structured most unusually. You get the book in a box. Within are all the chapters, individually bound. The first and the last are marked as such. All the others you can read in any order you like. Indeed, when I got the book, the first thing I did was shuffle all the chapters, make sure. What a superb and rather unique idea!

Unfortunately, it turns out that B S Johnson was rather more full of B S than great skill. Hailed (in his own press release) in 1969 as ‘the most important young English novelist now writing’, it turns out the only thing the author was any good at was self-directed hyperbole. The book is bad. I mean, really bad. It is telling that you can’t find even a proper front cover on Goodreads let alone an actual review. The picture above is from my own copy. It really is very not good at all.

For a start off, if you have a really whacky idea, you have to really make sure it will hold up. Johnson, frankly, cheats. He basic premise is that of the narrator retelling his memories of a good friend who dies from a terminal illness after a very long period of time. So far so promising. But these individual chapters are simply scenes from their lives – their meeting, their loves, graduating, marrying, meeting for drinks, football matches (yes really) and, of course, dying and the aftermath of that. The death and dying bit is presented in pretty much every single chapter including the first, so there’s no surprise here. Thus, you can read the actual death part at any time; it makes no difference.

But this way of doing it is simply boring. The chapters are interminably the same. I was hoping that the order you read them in would somehow change the feel of the story an thus, in theory, give every reader and unique story to enjoy. Now that would have been worth reading. But it isn’t like that. You honestly couldn’t care less about any particular events in any order. He would have been better off just presenting them chronologically. It wouldn’t stop them being boring however. It is everything that is dull about the British.

This isn’t helped by the author who, apparently, didn’t believe in fiction despite writing this fictional book and had scant regard for grammar and punctuation. So this book is quasi-autobiographical and throws any sense of sentence structure to the wind. Now in the hands of an e. e. cummings or a James Joyce, such radical action is superb and well thought out. With Johnson it is random and pointless. The whole thing smacks of pretentiousness. My feeling is that he was hiding a lack of talent behind ‘modern thinking’. It was, after all, the thing of the 1960s. Breaking the mould and all that. Many decades on and it just seems a bit ridiculous.

I had hoped that perhaps the last chapter would bring it back together in some way and redeem the author; but no. It was another six page ramble which you could have slotted in anywhere along the way. Even at the end, Johnson fails to say anything. There’s no depth, there’s no interest. I was so uninspired by the characters I couldn’t care less what happened to them during the story, let alone pass my test of being interested in them once the story ends. Even the chapter dealing with the death of the friend left me cold. If ever there is soulless writing, this is it.

Discussing this book with a friend (who is every bit as clever as Johnson but knows how to write a damned fine story) we started thinking about books which might have done this better. There weren’t many contenders. Two ideas for a similar book that came up during the course of our conversation were: a book where the change in order of the chapters gives a completely different story, unique to each reader; or a book with fixed chapters but if you read the chapters in reverse order give you a totally different perspective on the story.

I don’t know if such books could be written. I doubt I’m up to the job (even if I could find the time to try writing one). But it would be interesting to know if anyone has tried, or to read any such attempts if they happen in the future. Such efforts can’t be any worse than Johnson’s – so the only way is up!

Verdict:

Social Entrepreneur, educationalist, bestselling author and journalist, D K Powell is the author of the bestselling collection of literary short stories “The Old Man on the Beach“. His first book, ‘Sonali’ is a photo-memoir journal of life in Bangladesh and has been highly praised by the Bangladeshi diaspora worldwide. Students learning the Bengali language have also valued the English/Bengali translations on every page. His third book is ‘Try not to Laugh’ and is a guide to memorising, revising and passing exams for students.

Both ‘The Old Man on the Beach’ and ‘Sonali’ are available on Amazon for kindle and paperback. Published by Shopno Sriti Media. The novel,’The Pukur’, was published by Histria Books in 2022.

D K Powell is available to speak at events (see his TEDx talk here) and can be contacted at dkpowell.contact@gmail.com. Alternatively, he is available for one-to-one mentoring and runs a course on the psychology of writing. Listen to his life story in interview with the BBC here.

Ken writes for a number of publications around the world. Past reviewer for Paste magazine, The Doughnut, E2D and United Airways and Lancashire Life magazine. Currently reviews for Northern Arts Review. His reviews have been read more than 7.9 million times.

Get a free trial and 20% off Shortform by clicking here. Shortform is a brilliant tool and comes with my highest recommendation.

Social Entrepreneur, educationalist, bestselling author and journalist, D K Powell is the author of the bestselling collection of literary short stories “The Old Man on the Beach“. His first book, ‘Sonali’ is a photo-memoir journal of life in Bangladesh and has been highly praised by the Bangladeshi diaspora worldwide. Students learning the Bengali language have also valued the English/Bengali translations on every page. His third book is ‘Try not to Laugh’ and is a guide to memorising, revising and passing exams for students.

Both ‘The Old Man on the Beach’ and ‘Sonali’ are available on Amazon for kindle and paperback. Published by Shopno Sriti Media. The novel,’The Pukur’, was published by Histria Books in 2022.

D K Powell is available to speak at events (see his TEDx talk here) and can be contacted at dkpowell.contact@gmail.com. Alternatively, he is available for one-to-one mentoring and runs a course on the psychology of writing. Listen to his life story in interview with the BBC here.

Ken writes for a number of publications around the world. Past reviewer for Paste magazine, The Doughnut, E2D and United Airways and Lancashire Life magazine. Currently reviews for Northern Arts Review. His reviews have been read more than 7.9 million times.

Get a free trial and 20% off Shortform by clicking here. Shortform is a brilliant tool and comes with my highest recommendation.