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the complete review - fiction

Christie Malry's
Own Double-Entry

by
B.S.Johnson

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A : 'Funny, Brutalist, and Short' (just as Christie epigrammatised a novel should be)

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "(I)n der Tradition des experimentellen Erzählens und genauer noch in der Tradition jenes abgründigen angelsächsischen Humors, den Autoren wie Sterne, Joyce oder Flann O'Brien begründet haben. Das hat diesen kurzen Roman frisch gehalten, über Aufstieg und Ende des Thatcherismus hinaus bis in die Tage von "New Labour" und "Neuer Mitte". " - Michael Schmitt, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
  
  
• "While some of Johnson's tactics may seem dated, his questions remain provocative, his chilly humor pointed and sharp." - John House, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Das Besondere an dem Buch ist der direkte Dialog, in dem Autor und Protagonist stehen. Johnson beschreibt nicht aus literarischer Distanz einen abgedrehten Menschen, dem es gefällt, heimlich eine enorme Macht auszuüben. Stattdessen lässt auch er sich von Christie kontrollieren. Dieser verlangt zum Beispiel, die Geschichte müsse brutal sein und komisch. Das ist sie wirklich, und experimentierfreudig und überraschend ist sie auch. Eine britisch-böse Geschichte über die versteckte Anarchie." - Jenny Friedrich-Freksa, taz
  
  
• "Nicht im Erzählten liegt die Wahrheit, sondern in der Reflexion über das Erzählte. (...) Christie Malrys doppelte Buchführung zum Zweiten –- in der Hoffnung, dass diesmal auch die Leser mitziehen. Versprochen wird: ein geistreicher und grotesker Roman mit lauter kuriosen Einfällen." - Peter Urban-Halle, Die Zeit
  

  Quotes:

• "The most amusing of the novels (and Johnson had considerable comic talents) is the brief Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (1973). (...) There is much enjoyable fun at the expense of the author's own narcissism." - Frank Kermode, London Review of Books (5/8/2004)
  
  
• "Christie Malry is a modern revenge tragedy -- Thomas Kyd in synthetic fibres -- and reflects the submerged discontents of a writer who had once been a bored office clerk." - Henry Hitchings, Times Literary Supplement (18/6/2004)

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       "Christie Malry was a simple person." So begins the novel which tells the young man's tale, focussing on the time from when, barely seventeen, he first gets a job to ... well, to the end.
       His family is not wealthy, and he wants to be near money so simple Christie takes a position at a bank. It is a less than satisfactory experience, and so he decides to become an accountant, "in order to see where the money came from, how it was manipulated, and where it went." He enrolls in night classes, and meanwhile goes to work at Tapper's, a huge sweets and cakes manufacturer.
       Accountancy is the key, as he becomes quite enthralled by the Double-Entry system. Give and take, debit and credit -- or aggravation and recompense, as he defines it for his own purposes. It leads to Christie Malry's Great Idea: an accounting of his life. He starts keeping book.
       It's a fair idea, and in Johnson's hands blossoms very nicely indeed. Christie adds up his disappointments ("General educational trauma: 35.00" or -- our favourite -- "General diminution of Christie's life caused by advertising: 50.00") and the compensations (four misshapen chocolates: "0.01"). There are some grand aggravations, but Christie is not without ambition and resorts to some aggro of his own, to balance things out. Christie gets quite carried away (there is spectacular, if often seemingly incidental, carnage in this novel), but life has a funny way of balancing things out. Christie goes on until he has everything, and that turns out to be just a tad too much.
       There are five actual ledger pages in the novel, Christie's accounting as it progresses, right up to the writing off of the spectacular final bad debt. Most of the novel, however, follows Christie's life and (mis)adventures, a rollicking, clever, dark tale, well-told in a cascade of short chapters (with some long headings).
       Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry seems almost effortless. There's the usual Johnsonian play and experimentation -- the ledger sheets, for example, or the intrusive authorial presence making itself felt -- but Johnson goes about it with a minimum of fuss. In one exchange with his office supervisor Christie explains he was absent from work because of his mother's funeral:

SUPERVISOR: Why didn't you ask permission ?
CHRISTIE: She died at very short notice. In fact with no notice at all, on the evening before last.
SUPERVISOR: Long enough for you to arrange the funeral for the next day ?
CHRISTIE: There wasn't any more time. It's a short novel.

I'm going to pack this in soon: both everything and nothing in a person's past and background may be significant.

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Links:

• New Directions publicity page
• Pan Macmillan publicity page

• carpe librum (German)
• DeutschlandRadio (German)
• literaturkritik.de (German)
• Malleable Jangle
• Neue Zürcher Zeitung (German)
• Reading Matters
• taz (German)

• IMDb page

• The complete review's B.S.Johnson page

• Albert Angelo
• House Mother Normal
• See the Old Lady Decently

• Jonathan Coe's biography, Like a Fiery Elephant

• Consider the novels of Geoff Nicholson, similarly black and fun
• Works by fellow innovative writer, Ann Quin
• See also Contemporary British fiction at the complete review

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About the Author:

       English author B. S. (Bryan Stanley) Johnson (1933-73) studied at King's College, London. He wrote several highly acclaimed novels, as well as a play and poetry. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1967.

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