Even worse, in the same breath as criticising Johnson’s model of authorial honesty, Coe not only adopts it, but reduces it still further. His laddish, waggish interjections produce, as Johnson’s moves always did, the opposite effect from the one intended. ‘Here we go, then’, ‘You guessed it’, ‘Sound familiar?’ do not soothe but irritate; and ‘half of this book is hunches — had you not realised this by now?’ compels not my assent but my copy across the room.
In the end it’s less the formal experiment itself that gets me down than this jokey, adolescent tone (‘Johnson’s frustration at not being able to get into somebody’s pants’, for instance, is too crude for me). And c’est le ton qui fait la musique: how you sound, or want to sound, affects what you can say. Coe fills up too many pages with Johnson’s truly dreadful plays and boring British Council reports, and leaves some of the most difficult things to the end, when there’s no time left to consider them: Johnson’s compulsive eating, for example, or the question about his suppressed homosexuality. About this I know Coe lacks information, and the Coda, which does deal with it, is a gripping read. Still I am left with the sense that, like Johnson again, despite making special claims to the truth Coe doesn’t really tell it. He makes B. S. Johnson’s life sound comically painful; the true dark, mysterious story isn’t here.
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