IT is 30 years since The Unfortunates was first published and this is its first British reprint. It is the best known novel by B. S. Johnson (1933-1973) chiefly because it comes in loose sections. Those labelled first and last are separated by 25 separately bound chapters some only a paragraph long, some running to eight or 12 pages, which can be read in any order. The random order was chosen by Johnson as a metaphor for the random nature of cancer. The Unfortunates tells of a Saturday on which Johnson travels to a provincial city to report on a football match only to discover that it is the city in which he first met his friend, Tony, who died of cancer at the age of 29. In the course of the day, as Johnson has lunch, attends the match, writes his report, goes for a drink, then takes the train home, he remembers Tony, and himself as he was when he knew Tony, the progress of Tony's illness, and the parallel progress of his own life.
The prose is flat and unembellished, full of equivocation when he cannot remember exactly what happened. It is meant to be the equivalent of being inside someone's head as they experience what Johnson went through on that Saturday afternoon. There are occasional flashes of humour but, on the whole it is, indeed, very like spending a long afternoon with a self-obsessed writer.
To that extent, perhaps one should consider the novel a success. The problem is that Johnson's formal innovation was not matched by his content nor his style. The novel conforms to Johnson's theory of fiction, a theory which grew from his conviction that telling stories is telling lies, thereby totally denying the power of the imagination.
At times his work is little more than a prolonged investigation into his own state of mind. The livelier, less self-obsessed novels, Albert Angelo or Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry, would have been a more typical but less gimmicky choice for his relaunch.
Jonathan Coe's introduction is more concerned with Johnson's potential sales than with the nature of his work. Johnson is presented as an experimental novelist, a label he objected to most strongly in his lifetime. Readers generally assume experimental to be a euphemism for difficult, or incomprehensible. Johnson is not in any way a difficult writer - he writes in a chatty, informal style, discursive but never intimidatingly so; at his best he has a dark, playful humour which recalls, some would say derives from, the work of Laurence Sterne.
In fact, the formal innovations introduced by Johnson have not significantly added anything to those used by Lawrence Sterne almost 200 years earlier. Much as Johnson claimed to admire the work of Joyce and Beckett, he was no match for either in terms of artistic achievement.
Nevertheless, it is good to see him back in print, and to know that we can look forward to three more novels in the next year.
Alannah Hopkin is a writer and critic