Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson
by Jonathan Coe
Summary
B.S. Johnson was a British experimental novelist who believed the conventional novel was a lie, who published a book in loose sections in a box so the reader could shuffle the chapters, who cut holes through pages so you could read the future, and who killed himself in 1973 at the age of forty. Jonathan Coe, a mainstream novelist by temperament and practice, spent years trying to understand him.
The result is a biography that keeps arguing with itself. Coe admires Johnson enormously and does not agree with him about very much, and rather than resolving that he builds the tension into the book. Long stretches are given over to Johnson's own words. Coe interrupts to disagree, to admit he is stuck, and at one point to list what he has failed to find out.
It is a book about failure in several senses: a man convinced he was writing the future of fiction while his sales collapsed, a marriage and a career coming apart, and a biographer openly wrestling with whether the work justifies the devotion.
That makes it sound bleak, and much of it is. It is also very funny, because Johnson was, and because Coe has an excellent ear for the absurdity of the literary world he and his subject both worked in.
You do not need to have read a word of Johnson to follow it, and the biography does the generous thing of quoting enough that you can decide for yourself whether the experiments were breakthroughs or dead ends. Many readers finish it and immediately go looking for the novels, which is exactly what Coe intended.
Historical Context & Significance
Published in 2004, Like a Fiery Elephant won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction in 2005, the award now known as the Baillie Gifford Prize. D.J. Taylor described it in the Literary Review as a deeply unconventional biography, which is putting it mildly.
Coe worked from unique access to the enormous archive of papers Johnson left behind, together with dozens of interviews with the people who had known him. The book's most striking piece of research is its reconstruction of the last forty eight hours of Johnson's life, and Coe presents his account of it as an argument rather than a certainty.
The prize did what Coe most wanted. Johnson's novels had spent decades largely out of print before their reissue in 1999, and the biography brought his work a much wider readership, including on university courses.