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. ( )

Taking a cliché seriously and forcing the reader to think about what the words actually mean is a classic poetic device. But there probably aren't many writers who would be prepared to put themselves through three weeks of chronic physical discomfort and deprivation merely to justify their use of a corny metaphor. That, however, seems to be exactly what B.S. Johnson was up to when he joined a Hull trawler for a fishing voyage in the Barents Sea, to spend much of the time lying in his bunk suffering from terrible seasickness while he made a trawl through memories of his early life.

The result, as Jon McGregor suggests in his introduction to the 2013 reissue, is certainly "one of the finest novels about seasickness ever written." But it's also a fascinating (fictionalised) autobiography, in which Johnson takes us through the experiences of his wartime childhood, evacuated from London first to a farm in Surrey and then to High Wycombe. And through some of the more-or-less disastrous erotic adventures of his early years as a clerk and later a student in London.

Like practically all sex in British novels of the fifties and sixties, the bedroom scenes are catastrophically inept: rooms are inadequately heated, walls are too thin, clothes are awkward to take on and off and get tangled at awkward moments, condoms are a constant source of trouble and alarm, the participants usually turn out at a critical stage in proceedings to have had different, conflicting, agendas, and the evidence of what has happened has to be concealed from parents/landladies/flatmates afterwards. Johnson has a gift for making these episodes — in other writers often merely painful — both comic and touching, and his narrator always gives the impression of being open about his own inexperience and bad behaviour. He behaves like a man of his time, but in hindsight he's aware of his failure to take proper notice of what the women might have wanted.

The life of the fishing boat at first doesn't intrude very much into the narrator's self-centred reflections, apart from providing him with the need to vomit at intervals, but as we go on he starts to tell us more and more about the trawlermen and the work they do. And the fish — there are some wonderfully vivid descriptions of the varied catch that comes out of the net. At times the book almost strays into the territory of journalism or travel writing.

The two streams of narrative in the book seem to converge in the narrator's troubled sense of his own class-identity: in childhood, the kids in Surrey and High Wycombe looked down on him as a working-class Londoner; now he is cut off from the trawlermen by their sense of him as a graduate and a writer, despite his own (self-mocking, but still half-serious) idea of himself as someone who is doing hard physical work with his pen and notebook. Most of his relationships with women seem to have stranded on difficulties of class as well, although there is also an undercurrent of "perhaps it's just that no-one likes me". Or perhaps I'm just reading that in from knowing that it was depression that cut Johnson's life short so young.

Johnson is known for hard-core experimental tricks with the physical form of his books, but this one is almost conventional, with its only really obvious departure from classic book design being in the use of inline pauses  ·  ·  of various lengths  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  marked by dots, which take the place of conventional paragraph breaks. Not especially intrusive, and you soon get used to it. It's hard to say whether the subtle difference between — say — a five-dot pause and a seven-dot pause really makes a difference to our reading, but I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Not just a period-piece, definitely something that's still worth reading today. ( )

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. ( )