n Like A Fiery Elephant: The story of BS Johnson by Jonathan Coe, (Picador, £20).

THIS biography of the little-known writer BS Johnson is both passionate and remarkable.

Passionate because it is such a detailed and moving read, remarkable because its protagonist is, initially, such an unsympathetic character.

As a young novelist, Johnson rejected the conventional, 19th Century novel form, preferring instead the modernism of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce.

Even more austerely than these writers, Johnson believed that "telling stories is telling lies", and throughout his short career strove to write nothing but intensely personal and honest novels.

His motto was "truth, clarity, order and discipline", and had a brittle but forceful belief in his own genius, comparing himself to Beckett and dismissing any criticism.

This pigheadedness would lose him many friends, and his reluctance to compromise saw publishers running scared.

Over the years, Johnson's truculence painted him into an ever tighter corner. Letters to friends show deepening despair and paranoia.

Towards the end, he seems to have succumbed to madness. As a young man Johnson had written of a mysterious encounter with a living manifestation of Robert Graves' White Goddess, and, in his later life, he believed someone might be stalking him.

Like A Fiery Elephant is, like Johnson's own writing, unconventional. The writer's life is represented in 160 fragments, each dealing with a small aspect of his world and adding to a coherent whole. Coe himself questions the worth of literary biography, its subjectiveness, the battle between fact and assumption, in many of the ways Johnson questioned truth and lies in his own work.

And in the end, as Johnson's death approaches, we are shown a fierce and fascinating man crumble beneath the weight of his own doubt and shortcomings. It makes for a moving end to a wonderful biography.

Steve Warrington