Cover notes from Corgi edition, 1964
Travelling People is a most original novel which successfully experiments by
allowing the subject matter of each chapter to determine the literary technique used to
convey it. The range of experssion and characterisation is remarkable in a first novel and
augurs well for Mr. Johnson's future as a writer.
"An important achievement. I doubt if there are more than six other English
novelist writing today who can match his prose. His description of the love scenes between
Kim and Henry is a perfect marriage of language and situation; sex appears as a correlate
of love. For precise use of language, for sheer verbal entertainment, and for comedy of
situation, Tavelling People sets a standard of its own which would be hard for anyone
except Mr. Johnson to improve upon" - Western Daily Press
"In his novel, Mr B.S. Johnson looks back in spirit to the picaresque writers of
an earlier century, although the cast of his mind is modern. Sexual and other rivalries
abound ... Travelling People is rewarding indeed" - The Times
Cover reviews of Travelling People from Constable edition of Albert Angelo, 1964
"A most promising first novel ... the narration is often very funny and
sometimes moving ... Mr Johnson clearly has an original talent." - David Holloway,
Daily Telegraph
"Simply to lay bare the moral bones of Mr Johnson's novel is to lose the
succulent flesh which covers them. His scene is both comically and decoratively rendered;
his language is incisive; his thought is paradoxical and often disquieting." -
Simon Raven, Observer
"I enjoyed and admired it. The author has a mind, and he knows a lot and he
cares, and he is very good on people who are absurd but not contemptible." -
Christopher Ricks, New Statesman
"Clever and funny ... experiment and artistry" - David Pryce-Jones,
Sunday Times
"Original ... in the way that Tristram Shandy and Ulysses are
original." - Anthony Burgess, Yorkshire Post
"A notable and uncommonly good first novel ... Once Mr Johnson ... has decided on
the best permuataions and the right formula for his next experiment in literature he may
make an exceptional contribution to the chequered history of the English novel." -
Michael Hardcastle, Bristol Evening Post
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Albert Angelo
(1963)
Cover notes from Constable edition, 1964
Albert Angelo is the second novel of a highly talented young writer who arrived
on the literary scene with the force and brilliance of a meteor with his first book, Travelling
People.
Albert Angelo is equally as unconventional and exciting as its predecessor.
Albert thought he was at least a competent teacher before he moved to the Angel;
competent, if not dedicated, for he knew he was by vocation an architect and only by
economic accident a teacher. Most of the schools to which he now went as a relief teacher
were very different from those he had known previously: bad housing conditions, several
different immigrant groups, and indifferent teachers combined to bring some schools close
to an anarchy in which Albert felt ineffectual and out of place.
And then there was Jenny: Albert's failure, years before, to gain her love preoccupied him
for a large part of every day, and somehow she was involved in his mind with both his
failure as a teacher and his failure to fulfil himself as an architect.
As in his first novel, B.S. Johnson is here reacting against and successfully going beyond
the arbitrary conventional limits of the novel form, and using language with great
intelligence, precision and virtuousity. The result is exhilirating and disturbing, funny
and deeply serious, moving and shocking, and, above all, honest.
[ Back to Johnson
- first page ]
Statement against Corpses (1964)
Cover notes from Constable edition, 1964
In fourteen excellent stories two young writers give a dazzling display of the power
and scope of the short story form. Though B.S. Johnson is best know for his novels, Travelling
People and Albert Angelo, both he and Zulfikar Ghose are primarily poets, and
bring to short-story writing an economy and precision of language which makes their work
really fresh and exciting. In each of these stories great attention is paid to form, and
an impressive variety of techniques is used to match exactly style with subject in each
case.
Johnson's stories range widely in mood. Clean Living is the Real Safeguard captures
brilliantly the atmosphere of wartime childhood; in Perhaps It's These Hormones he
depicts with gentle irony the plight of the pop idol who has lost his following; Sheela-Na-Gig
creates a beautiful harmony between myth and reality; Statement is a monologue of
fierce protest, and Only the Stones is a delicate study in frustration; and Never
Heard It Called That Before is all boisterous irreverence as Johnson pursues an
hilarious inquiry into the origins of the Balls Pond Road.
In a contrasting gentler tone are the five stories by Zulfikar Ghose, a young Pakistani
writer. His settings range from the calm of an English public school to the wild bleakness
of the Indian countryside, and the delicacy of his language is exactly suited to the
subtlety of his themes. His last story, and the last in the volume, The Zoo People
is particularly fine.
This volume represents a joint attempt to affirm the importance of the short story as a
literary form. Statement Against Corpses, by a combination of technical
inventiveness and sheer quality of language, gives the short story a new lease of life.
But it is also an attempt, and a successful one, to entertain at all levels. These stories
cannot fail to delight; whether they are being boisterous or stern, angry or quietly
reflective, these two writers are never dull.
"These short stories have been written in the knowledge that the form is in
decline, but in the belief that this is due to no fault inherent in the form.
The short story deserves, but seldom receives, the same precise attention to language as
that given normally only to a poem.
This book represents a joint attempt, through demonstration of the form's wide technical
range, to draw attention to a literary form which is quite undeservedly neglected."
- B.S. Johnson & Zulfikar Ghose
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House Mother
Normal: A Geriatric Comedy (1971) Inventive,
unique, and wonderfully humane.
Cover notes from Bloodaxe Books edition, 1984
House Mother Normal is a remarkable study of old age. It is also a
major modern novel. B.S. Johnson's achievement in this 'geriatric comedy' was to deploy
his prodigious technical skills and inventiveness to explore the minds of the old with
precision, humour and unflagging compassion. He recognised its technical difficulties:
'What I wanted to do was to take an eveing in an old people's home and see a single
set of events through the eyes of not less than eight old people. Due to the various
deformities and deficiencies of the inmates, these events would seem to be progressively
"abnormal" to the reader. At the end there would be the viewpoint of the House
Mother, an apparently "normal" person, and the events themselves would then be
seen to be so bizarre that everything that had come before would seem "normal"
by comparison.'
Making each speaker's section follow the same chronological sequence, not only page by
page but also line by line, he achieves a disturbingly vivid multi-dimensional effect.
[ Back to B. S.
Johnson - first page ]
Poems Two (1972)
Cover notes from Trigram Press edition, 1972
B.S. Johnson writes: "These poems were written between 1964 and 1971. While
I am reasonably (even over-) prolific in other forms of writing, I manage so few poems
that it is seven years or so (as it was with my first volume) before I have enough for a
collection."
Poems Two, as its title ambiguously suggests, is B.S. Johnson's second collection of
poems. Poems also is another way of reading it, although poetry is a complement to
rather than an extension of his work as a novelist, playwright and film director. Here is
a man concerned with the experience of poetry as it touches every aspect of his living, a
man engaged in Exorcising, Loving, Observing, Unthinking and Rotting. These are the five
defining sections of his book.
"I maintain my self in the conviction
that I have as much to say as others
and more apposite ways of saying it
Certainly I feel it has all been said
The short fear is that even saying it
in my own way is equally pointless"
From 'The Short Fear' (Poems Two)
Johnson in Poems Two is much more at ease than in his 1964 volume. The problems of
form have been solved or overcome, and the poems gain in wit and seriousness as he moves
closer to the experience which has conjured the poems; indeed closer to the poems which
have conjured and informed that same experience.
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Christie Malry's Own
Double-Entry (1973) 
