Brownjohn, Alan
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1931- ) UK poet, man-of-letters and author, whose poetry – and whose infrequent fiction – is irradiated by a wry, compassionate, occasionally bitter socialist perspective on the course of British history; in this he is like and unlike Philip Larkin, as extensively demonstrated in a sympathetic study, Philip Larkin (1975 chap). His first fiction of sf interest – published in the ebb years of Thatcherism – is The Way You Tell Them: A Yarn of the Nineties (1990), in which Britain, as the millennium approaches, slips slowly into a Dystopian state whose rulers have learned well how to subvert and co-opt those who still retain their integrity, political or artistic. The much later Satire Enjoyment: A Comedy (2016), set in a Near Future very much like a labile present tense of tomorrow, is set in a London heavily surveyed by the drones of the Police Protection of Pleasure agency at a time punctuated by periodic "Great Years", whose effects can be – as in the twenty-first century in general – simultaneously cosmetic and transformative. [JC]
Alan Charles Brownjohn
born London: 28 July 1931
works
- The Way You Tell Them: A Yarn of the Nineties (London: André Deutsch, 1990) [hb/Janet Woolley]
- Enjoyment: A Comedy (Nottingham, Nottinghamshire: Shoestring Press, 2016) [pb/]
links
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