![]() His balancing of life’s books starts off with some relatively trivial entries: annoying junkmail on the doormat at home (Debit) is balanced by posting the wretched stuff back (Credit) the overbearing rudeness of his work supervisor (Debit) is balanced by sabotaging the firm’s incoming mail (Credit). Wrongs done to Christie by the world that is. ![]() A lightbulb goes on over his head: every Debit must have its Credit, not just in accounting but in life itself-a balancing and setting straight of things, a righting of wrongs. ![]() Christie, eighteen years old and working as a junior invoice clerk for a company making sweets and cakes, discovers something which will transform his life: double-entry bookkeeping. It draws on his own experiences as a young man not long out of school, in Hammersmith, west London, during the 1950s. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, the last to be published during Johnson’s lifetime, is among the least experimental though. ![]() Another is written in twenty-seven sections, twenty-five of which can be shuffled and read in any order, allowing you to reread a different book each time. Bryan Stanley Johnson himself disliked the term ‘experimental’ which is often used to describe his novels, but how else do you describe them? One is printed with holes in a couple of its pages, through which readers catch glimpses-like premonitions-of what’s about to happen next. ![]()
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