New word order | 3 December 2015

In the basement of a busy café in Hockley, Nottingham, which may not have known exactly what it was letting itself in for, a young woman is loudly dissecting an unsatisfactory lunch: ‘Deep in my heart I know I love chips.’ In another basement a few hundred yards away, lit by a single floor lamp, another woman is detailing the process of a man’s decline with tear-jerking, understated tenderness. For today only, both women are going by the name Bryan. They are among 60 volunteer performers in But I Know This City!, a unique adaptation of B.S. Johnson’s strange and sometimes wonderful 1969 novel The Unfortunates.

You might remember The Unfortunates as ‘the book in a box’ — 27 separately bound sections of varying length, one labelled ‘First’ and another ‘Last’ and the rest to be read in any order. They trace the wanderings of a football reporter remarkably like Bryan Stanley Johnson around a city remarkably like Nottingham, as he recalls a friend, Tony, who had lived there and died young, of cancer.