Book review: "John Lennon: The Life"
by SouthernFriedInfidel | Published on September 9th, 2009, 6:44 am | Arts
For the past couple of months, I have been wending my way through "John Lennon: The Life" by Philip Norman. I thought I'd give my impressions of it today, in honor of the Beatles re-release day.Overall, I think it is a really interesting work of biography. The story of John's life starts out in the 19th century, as we find that John's grandfather -- also a John Lennon -- came to America as a Minstrel singer and became rather popular. That fact alone was enough to grab my attention and get me keen on finding out more about this guy and his family.
When we get to learning about John's childhood and the many upheavals that occurred to make him end up being raised by his Aunt Mimi, it put me in mind of many other people I know. It was rather like watching a soap opera... meandering and apparently pointless with all sorts of odd twists brought about by people acting selfishly and for some unaccountable reason fighting over who got to keep and raise this poor kid.
John's rise to fame and fortune is one to inspire any aspiring rock star. But the thing that impressed me the most is how much of a selfish little jerk he appeared to be. Marrying his girl friend after knocking her up may have seemed like "the right thing to do," but he appeared to go overboard in the effort to keep his marriage under covers from the public. And to tell the truth, his aversion toward acting like a proper father for his son Julian seemed alien to me.
Sadly, it appears that John matured a little too late for everyone's good. In the final year of his life, when he made his last albums, he finally got his head screwed on right. The loss to the world, of a mature, very likely ground-breaking new phase in popular music that he was ready to work on, is the truly major tragedy of this story.
Regarding the writer and his style, I have a few thoughts to share. Most of the time, I found the writing easy to follow, but it was a fairly bumpy road at times. It seemed that he had too much material to share and in many places, the transitions from one thread of story to another were jarring. In many places, odd paragraphs seemed to have been inserted in the middle of a story line, as if inserted after the main manuscript had been completed as an afterthought.
I also found it a little jarring that he seemed to have himself bought into the Lennon-Ono pastiche of mystical beliefs -- horoscopes, psychic advisers and numerology seem to be accepted by him nearly as much as they were by Lennon. The story of particularly "significant" psychic warnings in the days before John was killed appears to have been accepted by him without question, though how someone could have heard such things and NOT have taken them as dire warning of real threat, if one believed in psychics, I can't imagine.
In any event, I have to say that the book was a pretty darn good biography. I can't say that John Lennon is a personal hero of mine any more, but I will say that I can appreciate him as a human being, instead of some mythical giant of rock-n-roll.
