Jonathan Coe. Like a Fiery Elephant.

Jonathan Coe. Like a Fiery Elephant. Continuum, 2005. 486 pp. $29.95.

About his book Trawl, B. S. Johnson wrote, "It is a novel, I insisted and could prove; what it is not is fiction." Johnson's novels--with the exception of House Mother Normal, which comes the closest to sporting a wholly invented cast of characters--have much in common with autobiography: they take Johnson himself as the subject and his life as the plot. Jonathan Coe, in his remarkable book Like a Fiery Elephant, has done the opposite: he calls biography what reads like a novel. Though thorough in his seven years of research, Coe does not overexplain the deep genealogical or personal minutiae of Johnson's life, does not shy away from extrapolation or conjecture, and does not claim to comprehensively and successfully account for the one, only, and true story of Johnson's life. What he does do, in the best tradition of the novel--or in Johnson's preferred tradition of the novel--is take chances with form and style and invent new modes for the particular situations and persons he describes. And Johnson, as unusual as he was, certainly requires such inventiveness. A Londoner by birth, he remained in the city throughout his life with occasional, but notable, trips away: several times to Wales, where he encountered the "white goddess" who became his obsessively pursued muse; to Paris, where he met Beckett, his idol; to Hungary, where he found both much-appreciated adulation for his work and a model for his political and social ideals; and to Eastern Europe again, where his profound disenchantment found--near the end of a life cut short by suicide--confirmation. The deserving winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, Like a Fiery Elephant makes sense of Johnson's life and work by keeping them as inseparable as Johnson himself, who was striking in his seriousness, did. Coe is not only writing about Johnson, but is also thoroughly inspired and influenced by him. Johnson's sad life and overlooked oeuvre (almost entirely unavailable in the U.S.) are at least partially redeemed by this biography, as Coe--who tends toward realism in his own fiction--assumes, with great success, the ambitions and risks of his subject. [Theodore Louis McDermott]