Like a Fiery Elephant: the story of B S Johnson Jonathan Coe Picador, 486pp, £20 ISBN 033035048X

English literature has rarely been friendly to ostentatious innovation, but in these anything-goes days, where memoirs pose as novels and history comes with a light dressing of fiction, genres can be swapped and blended as easily as coffee and syrup. Jonathan Coe is a celebrated novelist of a traditional sort and, on the surface, it is surprising that he should have attempted this serious biography of a figure who, in the 1960s, was a byword for suicidal literary "experimentation". B S Johnson wrote books with holes cut into them, books with blackened pages, unbound books that could be read in any sequence. But armed with the modern taste for cross-fertilisation, Coe has produced a glorious hybrid: a gripping and absorbing novel posing (for appearance's sake) as a life.

Not that he has taken any short cuts: he has done the hard biographical yards, and has supplemented his careful sifting of the papers - the books, letters, interviews, diaries and notes left behind following a literary career - with a nice range of smart interviews. But his narrative tactics rather than his discoveries breathe fire and life into the work. Johnson is introduced as the mysterious central character of a murder mystery. A writer who feels himself to be a "one-man literary avant-garde" is driven to suicide in 1973, at the age of just 40. Coe invites us to wonder why. There are several leading suspects:

1. The Oxbridge literary establishment. This is the most obvious interpretation, and also the most trite. Johnson is the working-class Hammersmith boy, born in 1933 and evacuated during the war, who educates himself and writes a string of masterpieces which are ignored by the blinkered snobs and schmoozers who run the book trade. When they reject him, he takes his own life, in a fabulous, samurai cri de cour.

2. Modernism. In this version, Johnson was not an innovator, but a camp follower, an admirer of Joyce, Beckett and others, a writer who delivered a gimmicky reprise rather than anything genuinely novel. Alas, he missed the joke at the heart of modernism - its sense of black comedy - and fell for its nihilism. What for Beckett was an existential dilemma came out, in Johnson's hands, as mere precious bleating, along with the inevitable belief that if only he had been French, he would have been famous. It also led him to feel that, in listing his own grievances, he was nailing "the human condition".

3. Doomed love. At King's College London, Johnson fell harrowingly in love with a woman called Muriel who did not reciprocate his passion, or even realise that it was, for him, an epic romance. Rejection installed her on a pedestal she could never vacate, and he himself never recovered. No subsequent relationship - not even with his beautiful wife and two children - could stop the bleeding, or heal the sense of lost happiness.

4. Juggling fiends. Johnson does seem to have had a brush with an occult fortune-teller who predicted, in a way he found persuasive, that he would die at the age of 29. Like many morbid students, he fell in love with this idea and liked dramatising himself as being destined for an early grave, especially when he read Robert Graves's The White Goddess, with its doomy insistence that art and love were implacable opponents. There is a sense that Johnson found suicidal despair to be a babe-magnet, if a risky one.

5. Doomed love (II). In a curious twist, Coe sniffs out Johnson's most ardent friendship - his agonising relationship with a Falstaffian kindred spirit called Michael Bannard. Their exchanges have a fiery homoerotic component and are also wracked with manipulations and betrayals. In Coe's hands this becomes an explosive property: a fervent secret held tight by a man wedded publicly to truth-telling.

Jonathan Coe is far too wise to play Poirot and finger a villain. The murderer, it turns out, was an amalgam of all of these, and self-destructiveness played a major role, too. Johnson was extremely talented when it came to offending friends and colleagues. And in blaming them, or the world in general, for his own "abiding sense of failure and isolation", he sometimes overlooked the extent to which it was provoked by his own bad moves or poor career choices. Coe leaves the door open to all the available explanations, and throws in a top-class essay on the relationship between literature and life for good measure.

The result is a model exercise in biography. Like a Fiery Elephant is driven not by an attempt to corral elusive truths into a neat stockade, but by a generous desire to shed light. Coe is happy to concede that the shedding of light often casts deep shadows, and it is these patches of darkness in his portrait - the silences, the absences, the sense of the unknown - that bring Johnson screaming to life. Only those who assume that people are monotonous would call him "contradictory", although it is true that he did - and does - provoke sharply divergent responses. On the one hand, I found myself applauding his brave commitment to ingenuity and novelty, and sympathised with his elitist dismissals of medium-wattage art. On the other hand, he could clearly be a crashing and selfish boor. In taking self-examination to be the one and only literary value, he sometimes failed to notice that it could lean dangerously close to self-aggrandisement, self-pity, self-promotion, and all the other transparent mechanics of self-defence.

The seven novels, too, remain a moot point: partly brave and brilliant forays, partly maddening pieces of autobiographical self-indulgence. "Anyone would think," Johnson writes testily at one point, "that I was writing for the public." He wasn't - but he reserved the right to sneer at the public for not showering him with acclaim. Perhaps time, which heals everything, will heal even this sore point.

It might even be possible that this biography is the book B S Johnson was born to write - the vindication of his life and the climax of his career. It is earnest, dazzling, elegant, full of perceptions and, most important of all, true (especially when it comes to acknowledging the limits of what we can ever know). Finally, it incorporates an innovation that far surpasses cutting holes in the page or monkeying around with the typography: in a magnificent authorial manoeuvre, it is written by someone else, thus taking (as the ghost-written bestseller list reminds us every week) the whole concept of authorship to a new and exciting level. Thirty years after his death, Johnson has inspired or found the ideal Coe-author. Maybe he'll be famous after all.

Robert Winder's Bloody Foreigners: the story of immigration to Britain is published by Little, Brown

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