William Leith
The Daily Telegraph, 23rd October 1999

The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson

THE AUTHOR of this lightly fictionalised memoir was an experimental writer, and his mournful account of a football reporter's day in a Midlands town is arranged experimentally, in separate sections, or pamphlets, contained in a box. Apart from the first and last pamphlets, the author invites you to read the book in a random order.

This, to B. S. Johnson, was a "solution to the problem of conveying the mind's randomness", and also, probably, a publicity stunt. It works on both counts, and has the effect of making this story, which is about death, doubly poignant. Johnson wrote the book in 1969 and killed himself in 1973.

The football reporter, a nihilist who overeats, arrives at the city and remembers the "blackened gantries . . . like steel gibbets", and also his friend Tony, who lived in the city and died of cancer, "his cheeks sallowed and collapsed round the insinuated bones, the gums shrivelled". The reporter is fat and bitter and appears to have more or less given up the ghost himself.

"All is nothing," he tells us, and "Sense does not exist." In an unsuccessful attempt to ease his depression, he buys chunks of ham in greaseproof paper and then wolfs them down.

Mostly, though, the book is about Tony and his lingering, senseless death. (Johnson's friend, an academic called Tony Tillinghast, died of cancer.) Each time you select a pamphlet, you are closer to or further away from Tony's death; the effect is an impression that death, rather than being the end of the story, is the story. Johnson writes as though death is not in the future, but has already happened. Thinking of Tony, trying to bring him to life in his memory, the narrator comes to the conclusion: "It doesn't matter, nothing does, it's all chaos. Look at his death, why? Why not?"

Our football reporter has a bad meal which is partly, but not totally, redeemed by chips ("Deep in my heart I know I love chips"), and he recalls the facts about the suicide of an acquaintance. During the match, perhaps symbolically, a player called Wisdom leaves the pitch, injured. The match itself is dismal, ending with an own goal.

In its way, this is brilliant - it is the best evocation of small- time misery I have ever read. Next to it, Larkin and Beckett seem wry and quipping.

1999 © Telegraph Group Limited