A few years ago new copies of a book called Never Say Boring Again, about a group of accountants, was sometimes to be seen on sale at bookstalls in suspiciously large numbers. It would undoubtedly seem boring, however, beside this one, in which the main character puts the principles of double entry accounting to uses which are unusual to say the least. It’s set in London in apparently the early Sixties.
So, a very black comedy about accountancy. Johnson was an experimental writer, but this work has a straightforward linear narrative. There is a great deal of complex wordplay – I expect I missed a lot of it but I spotted jokes in passing which relied on a knowledge of Welsh or of ornithology.