Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry

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Uncut made it their film of the month and later said it was "shamefully under-promoted by the British film industry". [8] The book and film are both set contemporarily to when they were released, so whilst the novel is set in the early 1970s the film is set in 1999, and Christie’s ledger includes cultural references such as Oasis, Ben Elton, The Simpsons and Chris Morris, along with Christie’s gravestone showing he dies in December of that year. Hoy la novela únicamente debería proponerse ser divertida, brutal y corta"Eso nos dice el autor a través de uno de sus personajes y, en efecto, este es un libro divertido en ocasiones y brutal en otras, incluso divertido y brutal a la vez; es un libro donde se aúnan la brevedad del relato y la sencillez de su lectura; un libro diferente en su forma; un libro donde los personajes son conscientes de vivir en una novela y que incluso charlan con el narrador, mientras que este no pierde ocasión de provocar al lector, de incitarle (las apariencias de los personajes se dejan totalmente abiertas a nuestras preferencias, incluso escenas tan apetecibles como los encuentros sexuales son expresamente confinados a la mucha o poca imaginación del quizás decepcionado indolente lector) y hasta de comunicarle sus disquisiciones acerca de la escritura de esta novela en particular como referente de la novela en general.

Debit and Credit are two things that every bookkeeper knows for sure… Therefore Christie Malry turns his life into a general ledger – all grievances inflicted on him by the world he enters on the side of debit and all his acts of revenge he enters on the side of credit trying to keep balance… His family is not wealthy, and he wants to be near money so simple Christie takes a position at a bank. Vanessa Guignery (2009), Ceci n’est pas une fiction. Les romans vrais de B.S. Johnson. Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, ISBN 978-2840506430

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London Consequences: A Novel (1972). A novel with each chapter composed by a different author including Johnson, Margaret Drabble, Paul Ableman and others In one exchange with his office supervisor Christie explains he was absent from work because of his mother's funeral: Moran plays Christie Malry, a twisted, psychotic accountant with an obsessive habit of taking revenge on the world for every slight he believes he has suffered - a scheme more in keeping with Hannibal Lecter than the real-life terrorists of this world. Christie Malry is twenty-something male who lives in West London with his terminally ill mother and works in an office, a job he finds unfulfilling and so distracts himself from the boredom by having violent fantasies in which he threatens his manager with a shotgun. At the suggestion of his friend Bernie he takes a night class in accountancy, where he is introduced to the theories and teachings of Fra Luca Pacioli, an early pioneer in the field of accounting and the author of Summa de arithmetica, one of the first books on the practice of double-entry bookkeeping. Christie then resigns from his job and, shortly afterwards, Bernie is killed in a vehicle collision. 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

Toward the end of the book there’s a brief chapter in which Johnson sits down with his main character, Christie, and they talk over the book’s progress. Johnson keeps varying the formula of self-awareness: Hopefully the rhetorical device of these four questions did the job of bringing forth some memories, once-read articles or other related experiences to wash this world of endless economisation and monetisation with some personal colour. But if it failed, let me reiterate: There seems little left of our lives or the world around us that is not already captured by the power of the pound and profit. And where there remain glimmers of non-capitalist existence, there is a man, always a man, somewhere, dreaming and scheming of how to make it not so. Nothing has merit in and of itself, but solely through systems of confused and crooked accountancy. Health and care buried beneath cost-benefit analysis. Education dictated to by metrics of employability and earning outcomes. The knowledge economy. Culture must provide a return on investment. The world heads to environmental and societal crisis and the necessary action is deemed just too expensive. They drown and burn and flee, while we comfortably wait for the manna of market-based solutions.In later life he settled in Islington, north London, living in Claremont Square and Myddelton Square, after which he bought a house in Dagmar Terrace, Islington, where he lived until his death. On 31 March 1964 he married Virginia Ann Kimpton (b. 1938), a teaching machine programmer; she figures as Ginnie in his novel Trawl. They had two children. [7] Career [ edit ] B.S. Johnson turned out to be an exception to the rule that British and experimental literature don't mix. Instead of being the obtuse and near-impossible to find a hole in the text to get inside and figure out exactly what the author is even attempting to do, Johnson made it quite easy to at least get engaged in the book. His writing was more akin to early John Barth or DFW than to someone like Ann Quinn, and his sense of humor moved in what could now be classified as standard meta-fiction antics. The biggest debit recorded by Christie is that socialism has not been given a chance. This is essentially the political message of the novel, but not mentioned in the film. Johnson became depressed by his failure to succeed commercially and by mounting family problems. On 13 November 1973, aged 40, he took his own life by slitting his wrists [11] at 9, Dagmar Terrace, Islington N1. He left an estate valued at Despite the overwhelming concurrence with the canon regarding the absolute sanctity of human life, in fact society saw that human life was in fact a very inexpensive, plentiful and easily-disposable asset. Of all things, human life was the easiest to replace. A machine would be difficult, costly : but the man who drove or worked or manipulated it could be replaced at very short notice by any one of millions of other men, all equally capable after a little training, all equally replaceable. Women were even cheaper. Human life is cheap, dirt cheap, according to this society, judged by the way it acts, the only true test, saw Christie, despite its pious mouthings. What it does in practice is not what it says it does. It does not care for human life : it shortens that life by the nature of the work it demands, it poisons that life in pursuit of mere profit, it organises wars from which it is certain mass killing will result . . . but you know the ways in which we are all diminished : I should not need to rehearse them further.

There is a collection of B. S. Johnson's literary papers and correspondence in the British Library (Add MS 89001). [18] Bibliography [ edit ] Novels [ edit ] Unlike most people, he doesn't necessarily like what he sees, so he does something about it, albeit with his author’s hands or the hands his author supplied him. 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 And all the money just pass him by… So to be yet closer to money he decides to become an accountant… Christie,’ I warned him, ‘it doesn’t seem to me possible to take this novel much further. I’m sorry.’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) Johnson has a lot of fun with language - e.g this 'dictionary battle' between Malry's superior and an angry customer (the dispute a result of Malry's mischief making): Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2010-06-22 21:27:06 Boxid IA122704 Camera Canon 5D City Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Donor A total of just over twenty thousand people died of cyanide poisoning that morning. This was the first figure that came to hand as it is roughly the number of words of which the novel consists so far.