Trawl

by B.S. Johnson

With an introduction by novelist Jon McGregor.

The novel describes, in the first-person, a three-week voyage aboard a deep-sea fishing trawler in the Barents Sea, not unlike the one Johnson undertook in preparation to write the book. Isolating himself from the world he knows, as well as from the ship’s crew, the narrator reflects on past events and relationships, hoping for some kind of redemption. This convincingly authentic and harrowing attempt to get to the heart of the human condition is one of Johnson’s finest novels.

In his heyday, during the 1960s and early 1970s, B S Johnson was one of the best-known novelists in Britain. A passionate advocate for the avant-garde, he became famous for his forthright views on the future of the novel and for his unique ways of putting them into practice. Convinced that ‘telling stories is telling lies’ and that he should write about ‘nothing else but what happens to me’, Johnson produced Trawl.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, Literature, 20th Century

192 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

B. S. Johnson (Bryan Stanley Johnson) was an English experimental novelist, poet, literary critic and film-maker.

Johnson was born into a working class family, was evacuated from London during World War II and left school at sixteen to work variously as an accounting clerk, bank junior and clerk at Standard Oil Company. However, he taught himself Latin in the evenings, attended a year's pre-university course at Birkbeck College, and with this preparation, managed to pass the university exam for King's College London.

After he graduated with a 2:2, Johnson wrote a series of increasingly experimental and often acutely personal novels. Travelling People (1963) and Albert Angelo (1964) were relatively conventional (though the latter became famous for the cut-through pages to enable the reader to skip forward), but The Unfortunates (1969) was published in a box with no binding (readers could assemble the book any way they liked) and House Mother Normal (1971) was written in purely chronological order such that the various characters' thoughts and experiences would cross each other and become intertwined, not just page by page, but sentence by sentence. Johnson also made numerous experimental films, published poetry, and wrote reviews, short stories and plays.

A critically acclaimed film adaptation of the last of the novels published while he was alive, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (1973) was released in 2000.

At the age of 40, increasingly depressed by his failure to succeed commercially, and beset by family problems, Johnson committed suicide. Johnson was largely unknown to the wider reading public at the time of his death, but has a growing cult following. Jonathan Coe's 2004 biography Like a Fiery Elephant (winner of the 2005 Samuel Johnson prize) has already led to a renewal of interest in Johnson's work.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The narrator is a passenger – a so-called pleasuretripper – on the trawler and the severe case of seasickness – notorious mal de mer – afflicted him to the state of physical incapability…

While they are hauling the ship wallows, and the motion is worse, I feel sickest at such points, when they are hauling: but lying down helps: I could not stand it on deck, my stomach feels as though it is trying to unseat itself, impel itself upwards, eject itself free of my shuddering body. Sometimes I wonder what stops it, at which point the body forces itself not to be seasick in order that it may survive, that the stomach may be still.

So he has nothing to do but lie in his bunk remembering his troubled past: his wartime childhood, first sexual experience, dubiously romantic trysts, unrequited love, jazz music.

My uncle and my mother and my father told me as well that once they were walking with me down by the river past a house bought by Henry VIII for Nell Gwynne. My mother asked why, and my uncle replied for goings-on or some such. They tell me that I then said that I had often seen them there together, Nell Gwynne and the eighth Henry. This caused them great merriment at the time. Enough for them to want to tell me of it in later years, anyway. I do not remember this pearl of wit, myself. So much of one’s childhood must be taken on trust, seen refracted through others. Especially the earlier parts of a childhood.

He recalls… And his narration becomes a stream of memory… And a stream of memory becomes a stream of unhappiness.

I create my own world in the image of that which was, in the past: from a defective memory, from recollections which must be partial: this is not necessarily truth, may even be completely misleading, at best is only a nearness, a representation.

But somehow his seasickness and trawling through the past serve as a kind of remedy and in the end of the voyage he feels purged.
Often, while remembering our past, we see the events that seemed important at the time just as trivia of life and some insignificant details we hold especially dear.

[James Tingle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of the four books I've so far read by Johnson, although all have been really good, I found this one to be the best. Its pretty basic in terms of plot, but that's one of the great things about it- there's no figuring out what this means or who that person is, its just a guy and his recollections, which I found to be a breath of fresh air and a bit different. The main character books himself onto a fishing trawler as a pleasure tripper and gets a cabin to himself with a bed and spends his time lying on the mattress, staring at the ceiling, examining his life in forensic detail, to work out where it all went wrong. These intensive self reflection bouts are riddled with feelings of sea sickness, as he tries to lie there as still as possible and keep his mind concentrated on his regret filled past.
I like how the lengthy dredging sessions into the depths of his memory, are occasionally broken up by the poor guy crawling out of his cabin and going above deck to watch the fishermen pull in their nets; filled to the brim with writhing sea life. You then get detailed descriptions from him about what the fishermen are doing and exactly what's going on around him, which I found enlightening, as I don't know much about life on the high seas. He stands there in his haggard, dejected way as the spray from the sea bursts over the decks and shimmering swathes of fish slither about in the filth and the froth, to be gathered by the gnarled hands of the fishermen. Once he's seen enough, he retreats from the clamour of the catch and seeks solace once more in his dingy cabin and again plunges back into the troubling memories of his youth...
To a lot of people reading this, you may think this novel sounds unpleasant and maybe even quite monotonous and a bit depressing, but something about it drew me in and I loved the contrast between his shadowy cabin recollections of the past, and then his brief sojourns to the deck, clambering out into the piercing blue morning, as real life assaults him mercilessly and jolts him back to the lamentably unavoidable present...a memorable book.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

The whole time I read this I heard in the background the Fine Young Cannibals' song "Don't Look Back."

Baby baby don't look back
It won't do no good

Because it won't. And it doesn't.

The whole book is presented as the narrator's meandering thoughts as he weaves a blasted trail down memory lane, poking, examining, putting under the microscope the daily minutia of his past lives. The earliest scenes he relives are from his early 20s, fresh out of university. There was enough here to keep me interested, but then the lanes shift and we're back to WWII and the narrator is reliving his childhood. I relive my childhood on a daily basis, looking for a calm place. But I don't think anyone else would find it interesting to read about. And that was when Trawl first stopped working. I felt pity for him because of his plight, but it it was boring as hell to read. There was never enough to make me care, like, a lot. There was pity, but that was about it. Then I wanted the kid to shut the hell up.

Then we relive the narrator's sorted college days some more. Those were a little more engaging, and at times I found myself drawn to what was happening.

All of this is happening as the narrator takes a two or three week pleasure cruise aboard the titular trawler, the gag being, apparently, that as the trawler trawled for fish, the narrator trawled his thoughts for all his past wrongs.

It goes on and on, more or less the same, at times engaging, at times whatever. And then it ends peculiarly, for a Johnson novel.

It did one thing. It made me realize looking back really doesn't do any good. Looking forward doesn't either. All that's left is now. And that's pretty fucking scary.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting, clever, original short novel about a young man going for a three week break on a fishing trawler. Whilst on the trawler he reflects on his past. Remembering his school days and his girlfriends. He describes his experience on the trawler. The novel is written in the form of an internal monologue.

This book was first published in 1966.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I <3 B.S. Johnson

[Sammi · Rating 1 out of 5]

One sentence review for a one star read: Next time, please leave the fish out of it.

[David Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorite Quote = "I have come through. Look we have come through."

From my “1001 Books to Read Before You Die” (Edited by Peter Boxall) reading list.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his third novel, the experimental novelist (a term he came to dislike), pursues relentlessly his mission to write truth rather than fiction. Largely a roman à clef, then, it differs in the starkness with which the author lays bare his own thought processes. There is no attempt at all to show himself in a good light, a point he acknowledges just once in the book. The narrator comes across, for instance, as pretty misogynistic and rather adolescent. It is in this aspect that the novel is experimental and at its most bold. Structurally, it's fairly conventional. The narration is part-stream of consciousness, which was nothing new at the time, and sometimes contains strangely old-fashioned phrasing - "But is it she?" - reminiscent of the Victorian revivalist novel of which he was so dismissive. There's no plot, which is good for its experimental credentials - man sails out of Grimsby as a non-working guest on a deep-sea trawler and reflects upon his earlier experiences - but could be a problem for some readers, depending on how they view a "good read". It's beautifully written, though, and I enjoyed the "present moment" sections best, with their descriptions of deep-sea fishing.

[Yael Itamar · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is about a man on a ship (a fishing boat, I think). In between constant bouts of seasickness, he reminisces on his childhood and on all of his awkward sexual encounters. The book contains very long passages where he jumps from one memory to another. The style is interesting in that it resembles the way memory works, but it is also dry and difficult to follow. It didn't help that the main character was passive and uninteresting. None of the other characters really stuck out in my mind.

Admittedly, I am not the best person to review this book, as I don't have the greatest attention span, so I'm sure there was a lot in this book that someone else would notice or appreciate that I completely missed.

[Deanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Johnson has a way of getting into the head of his main characters and explaining why the past experiences impact on their behaviour. Our hero decides to go to sea for three weeks on a trawler, a journey described in detail, from leaving England and crossing the North Sea and ending off the coast of Russia. The workings of the lives of the trawler men is also gone into, but most indepth is the hero's thoughts on his own isolation and what has caused it.
Johnson seems to have put a lot of thought into this, and did make me wonder judging from when he was born how much of this is about Johnson.

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Usually I am all for individual reviews but in the case of these three B.S. Johnson novels it made more sense to review them together.

For those who don’t know B.S. Johnson was Britain’s most well known author of experimental literature. His belief was that stories told lies and an author’s job was to continue where Joyce left off and not create neo Dickensian literature. As a result he did insert himself in his first few novels. Whether he succeeded in being Joyce’s successor, I don’t think so but out of the five out of seven books (His first and posthumous last one are difficult to find) I’ve read do stretch the boundaries of how a novel is perceived.

There is also a second reason why I read all these novels and that is because I have attempted three times to read Jonathan Coe’s B.S. Johnson biography and failed. Hopefully I’ll get through it this time round.

Albert Angelo
Albert Angelo is Johnson’s second novel. The title character is an architect who only designs buildings for himself and earns money from being a supply teacher. This draws on Johnson’s years of being in the same profession.

We are presented with different writing styles ; from first to third person. One section has Albert teaching a class on igneous rock while half the page is dominated by what he is thinking at that moment. Two sections are dedicated to various students writing essays about Albert. There’s even a travelogue inserted midway through the novel. When not teaching Albert goes drinking with his friend lamenting on their lost loves.

The book can be seen as the attitude of children in post war Britain but Johnson pulls off a coup towards the end and Albert Angelo morphs into B.S. Johnson’s philosophies about contemporary literature. It’s clever a lot of fun to read.

2. Trawl

B.S. Johnson’s third novel is seen as his most autobiographical one. It’s also his most honest and experimental. At this juncture Johnson was running out of personal material so he decided to spend three weeks on a fishing trawl. The end result is a long stream of conscious ramble about all Johnson’s failures, with actual happenings on the trawl. Although considered his best, I found it draining. Incidentally he had one more book based on real events and that’s The Unfortunates, thus making novels 2-4 a triptych of his life.

3. House Mother Normal

I see House Mother Normal as B.S. Johnson phase 2. Here he has clearly written a novel albeit one with a heavy post modern ending which takes it to a different direction. The book consists of eight monologues in an old age home. All are describing the same event: a pass the parcel game with a rather nasty surprise and a jousting tournament using mops and wheelchairs. All eight inmates have a 21 page monologue, the trick is that the older the character is, the more fragmented is the speech. The ninth monologue is by the House Mother whose piece is quite unsettling. House Mother Normal is a predecessor to the same type of anarchical playfulness displayed in Johnson’s final novel (and my personal favourite, Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry I had a ton of fun reading this one as well.

Before anyone says something – B. S. Johnson’s novels were specifically designed to be read in one sitting. One can note the care and precision on the words and book design used. Sure there were others before him but one can realise that there’s a great big heart besting in all his works, which made him stand out.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Throughout much of his short life (he committed suicide at the age of forty) Johnson suffered from bouts of depression and, in search of isolation, of the time to perform a kind of exorcism on himself, went off on a sea voyage. Typical of the man, though, this was no sun-drenched cruise through the tropics—instead, he spent three weeks aboard a Grimsby trawler on a run up to the cod-fisheries in the Barents Sea north of Arctic Norway. Trawl is his account of the trip.
    This is among the least “novel” of his novels, the simplest. It consists entirely, from start to finish, of his own internal monologue as he examines his past in as much detail as he can stand: early schooldays; wartime as a child-evacuee to the countryside from the terrors of the London Blitz; women he has known, and lost… What he’s trying to do, of course, is trawl the ocean deeps of his mind for clues (he actually tells you that himself on page 21) but, in fact, spends much of his time prostrate in his bunk wracked by bouts of sea-sickness: as with depression, these seem to come out of nowhere and engulf him like bad weather, leave him completely helpless, unable to do anything except curl up in a ball with a blanket pulled over his head.
    Johnson is best known (or notorious) for the innovative features of his books (which fans like me call “imaginative” and his critics call “gimmicks”): those pages printed with lined-up holes in them, the book-in-a-box and all the rest. I love all that myself, but what has taken me longer to realise is that what I like most about his novels is, simply, the quality of his writing. I find them hugely readable and some of the writing brilliant; here in Trawler, between the dredged-up memories, there are descriptions of the ship itself, its captain and crew, the fish they catch, the weather and, above all, the ocean itself, all wonderfully realistic (or “true”, always Johnson’s point). Ironically, if he’d never bothered with the avant-garde stuff, had instead written only the sort of standard, conventional and unoriginal novels he so detested, he’d have been good at it. I’m glad he didn’t though.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Trawl' reeled me in my the end, once I had adapted to the deliberately choppy stream of consciousness of its narrator. I didn't know anything about B.S. Johnson before I started. Johnson was an experimental novelist of the 1960s whose books included one with a hole drilled through to a spoiler, and another comprised a box filled with multiple sections that the reader could recombine into a huge number of different combinations. By contrast, Trawl is relatively conventional, and I found it a good introduction to Johnson's work.

I won't say I loved 'Trawl' from the start. The drift between seasickness and memories of sexual partners doesn't offer the reader much of an anchor. The human brain loves order, pattern and plot, but instead we are given the chance firing of random neuronal connections. Even within the miscellany of these memories, their are interruptions, contradictions and reversals: often we are told that an anecdote may be erroneous, a partial truth or a diversion from the 'point'.
What the larger 'point' of the novel is unfurls, like a net of thought over a shoal of separately-swimming thoughts.

The reward for reading through was threefold. Firstly, I found a life-like plausibility in how the mind's wanderings are set out. Fictions often simplify thought processes, whereas Johnson gets closer to the digressions and irrelevancies that pepper actual thought. Secondly, Johnson subtly builds-up to a view on how far every man is an island. Not only do we swim around in the narrator's head for much of the novel - cut off from the wider action - but we share in his thoughts on how far he is an outsider. Thirdly, and finally, Johnson gives us a wonderfully wrought evocation of seasickness.

To end on a very Johnsonian non sequitur... A trawlerman from my hometown of Lowestoft has a bit-part in this novel, and is named 'Duff' after the pudding he is (and other East Anglians are) renowned to love eating. I know of duff but haven't made it before, so like the butter cake in Peter Carey's 'Illywacker', it's going on my list of cake recipes prompted by novels...

[Pip · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating and enjoyable read. The author takes a three week journey on a fishing boat as a supernumery, or a "pleasure tripper" as the crew describe him. The boat sails from England around the top of Norway to the coast of Russia and back and the whole time the author/protagonist is violently seasick. Despite seasickness being the depth of misery for me, the ruminations of the victim, lying on his bunk were interesting and sometimes funny. His stream of consciousness style is familiar now, perhaps not quite so much when this book was published in 1966, because it was labelled experimental at the time. Johnson believed that one should write from experience, not from the imagination, but his success as a novelist was not sufficient to keep him from slitting his wrists in the bath at the age of 40. Because he is so censorious of himself as a lonely child suffering from feelings of abandonment from having been sent to the comparative safety of Surrey during World War II, his demise is not too shocking, but I do not know enough about the author's life to know how strictly he kept to telling only experience, not imagination. Whether true or not, his reflections, particularly on his sexual experiences are entertaining stuff.

[Joe Maggs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Big thanks to Dorset Library HQ for stocking a singular copy of a BS Johnson omnibus containing two works I’ve struggled to get my hands on, the first of which being this.

By far the least experimental work of Johnson’s I’ve read thus far, with one more to go. Listening to a man who is 33 recount his life, interspersed with commentary on life on a deep sea trawler, turned out to not be the most enthralling experience in part. The exercise reminded me of what my once therapist called “worry time” - setting aside time to worry about everything so to not let it take over your life. BS Johnson does this in Trawl, only for three whole weeks, in an attempt to clear his mind and come to some sort of understanding to allow himself to be capable of developing a strong relationship with his future wife and mother of his children Virginia.

As an emotional and literary endeavour this is to be commended, and presumably is why it won Johnson one of few literary awards he would receive in his short career. For me though, it doesn’t stand up against Albert Angelo, The Unfortunates nor Xtie Malry. Johnson didn’t like writing fiction, he thought it lies, but those other works are just as based in truth, but are written in a way that is much more interesting. Trawl fell short here.

[Kristel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book by B. S. Johnson written in 1966 is a book about a man who has decided to take a trip on a fishing boat. He is not a seasoned fisherman. In fact he is sick, sick a lot. We, the reader, get to hear of his memories of his past. He spews these out just like he spews everything in his gut. It is a mess, out of order, without necessarily making sense and the author tells us that maybe he is wrong in his memories. The narrator is essentially alone and isolated. He does not fit in with the crew and being sick keeps him from making any connections.This author was experimental in his approach and therefore he did contribute to the development of the novel. Rating 3.83

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Еще один роман о раскопках в памяти, как и «Тоннель» — тоже из 60-х, хоть и по другую сторону Атлантики, и значительно короче. Только тут он весь повешен на метафору трала, а не копки ямы, хотя на самом деле, конечно, повествует о морской болезни. Что ж их так прибивало по памяти памяти в то время-то?

[Joyce · Rating 2 out of 5]

johnson's most tedious tendencies given full flight, he refuses to allow even the actual interest of the voyage itself to be anything more than interludes between his determined navel gazing avoidance of what he's actually good at writing

[Elizabeth Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

I pity the narrator (perhaps, given Johnson's dedication to authorial authenticity, to be equated with the author more than I would readily do): this is a thoroughly sorry account of seasickness that sounds like utter misery for three whole weeks, while he also trawls through his past as a way of exorcising the pain of isolation, abandonment (as an evacuee in High Wycombe), and rejected love. At times, the narrator, at least as he himself tells of his recent past self, is a sex-obsessed misogynist with anger issues, who is clearly pretty bad in bed, even when he describes the sex as ‘good’ (from his own self-obsessed point of view). The writing meanders without ever totally losing its way, even as vomiting interrupts the reminiscence. Visceral prose.

There's a really excellent audio performance for those who can't take the narrow-margin type-setting here (Johnson's own).

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

BS Johnson was an experimental writer. This book however is quite a conventional stream of consciousness. A landlubber organises passage on a deep sea trawler to isolate himself so as to look deep inside himself as he regards his life to date. (Johnson undertook just such a trip for research for the character). Unfortunately the character is racked by a terrible sea sickness which confines him to his bunk for much of the time, thus strengthening his isolation, but enabling him to do nothing but cast back into his past. part of these recollections are brilliantly observed, particularly the opening desultory relationship with a woman called Joan. The era of the late 1950s Britain slowly emerging from post-war austerity is really well painted. But the long section on the character's wartime evacuation as a child I found less involving. Then there are the sections where the character finds his sealegs and goes about observing the minutiae of the peregrine ways of the boat and as well as these are described, again I wasn't particularly engaged by what seemed like a fairly straight reportage, somewhat at odds with the portrayal of events from his past: the former he just doesn't seem involved with, unlike of course the reflections on his own life.

So there are overall metaphors of him trawling through his life, with some of the unrecapturable memories slipping through the holes in the mesh, or being thrown back as unimportant tiddlers not worthy of further scrutiny. We get the notion of waves, of waves of sickness (and repulsion), of the reeling boat, of the ebb and flow of his own mood, veering between inflated ego and utter despondency and depression about life.

But ultimately this book doesn't quite work for me because of its solipsism (the book begins and ends with a statement of the centrality of the "I"). I can't say whether this character is Johnson himself or not, but the character is wholly self-obsessed and self-involved which does not invite the reader into any more universal statement of what it is to be human. it never rises above the story of this individual character within the world of the book. It has some fine touches and some great passages, but I don't think it quite holds together, either as an experimental work (which it absolutely isn't) or just as an involving novel.

[Kelly_Hunsaker_reads ... · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trawl is an odd book in which the narrator tells the story in a series of meandering thoughts and memories. It takes place on a 3 week sea-faring journey where he is violently ill and is examining his memories of past relationships as well as reliving his childhood. The title is apt as it feels as though he is trawling his memories.

The narration is unreliable and at times he even says that he is not sure that the events actually occurred and that they may have been dreams. This was actually the part of the storytelling that I liked most because it is so real. We are all unreliable narrators of our own stories. Our thoughts and memories are formed based on the time and place in which we live, the ways we are raised, our political and religious views, and so much more. And the memories of events in our lives are colored by the people we know, the education we receive and the mood we are in when the events occur. Nothing about memory is absolute and we could talk to 100 people who lived through the same events but get 100 stories. This book really explored that.

However, despite all of that and despite the empathy I had ... it often felt more like pity than compassion. And most of the time I didn't care at all about whatever hurt this man. I found him a bit frustrating and boring. I never fully connected with him. I felt pity for him because of his plight, but it it was boring as hell to read. There was never enough to make me care, like, a lot. There was pity, but that was about it. Then I wanted the kid to shut the hell up.

[Grim-Anal King · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slow burner by Johnson standards; patchy but ties together better than expected at the end. The lengthy childhood reminiscence sections were rather dull. I wonder how much of them were based on the author's own experience.

[Scott Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not Johnson's best, as it starts out slow, but still, a fine read.

[Tarah Luke · Rating 2 out of 5]

#1001books #679left

Not a fan of stream of conscious work so this was wasted on me. His descriptions of what he saw on his voyage was interesting but ultimately I disliked the main character's self-centeredness and wallows/broody thoughts, which are completely pointless and unproductive.