The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Dance to the rhythm of rage
Pages that sang – from Britney Spears’s catharsis to Bob Dylan’s notebook
The year’s most riveting music book came from a surprising source. Britney Spears: The Woman in Me (Gallery, £25) allows the embattled superstar to tell her own story, and it is not a pretty one. Related by Spears with a degree of understatement that belies her fury, it details how her innocently joyous instinct for pop music was exploited by both the industry and her family to turn her into a cash cow with no control over her own life.
Modern fame has claimed many victims, but what sets this tragedy apart is that it ends on a note of redemption, as the victim of cruel abuse gets the final word. Ultimately, it is a story not so much about music but of how women are routinely mistreated by the music business and the media.
There is a more positive narrative in Mary Gabriel’s exhaustive 800-plus-page biography Madonna: A Rebel Life (Coronet, £35), which contextualises the reigning female pop superstar in contemporary social history, arguing the case for Madonna as one of the most influential feminists of our times. A worthy project, albeit academically dry and fawning, it belongs to a wider trend for the more ephemeral aspects of popular music to be treated with serious critical interest. Michael Cragg takes a more lighthearted approach to just such subject matter in Reach for the Stars (Nine Eight Books, £25), an amusing and surprisingly poignant oral history of post-Britpop bubblegum pop, from the Spice Girls to S Club 7.
Clinton Heylin adds to the countless books on Bob Dylan already out there with the completion of his mammoth revisionist biography The Double Life of Bob Dylan: Vol. 2 1996-2021 (Bodley Head, £35). An eccentric, rambling, bad-tempered book – as if the author has been driven half-mad by his subject – it is packed with interesting information for rabid Dylanologists. The even heftier Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine (Callaway, £80), curates more than 1,000 images and objects from the Bob Dylan Centre in Tulsa. If you want to examine the first draft of Tangled Up in Blue in Dylan’s tiny handwriting in a battered old notepad, this is the book for you.
The unadorned intimacy of Paul McCartney’s photobook 1964: Eyes of the Storm (Allen Lane, £60) makes it a treat for Beatles fans. Taking a more tangential trip through pop history, in Living the Beatles Legend (Mudlark, £25), author Kenneth Womack dives into the intriguing life of their longserving and ultimately tragic road manager Mal Evans. Musician and author Bob Stanley, meanwhile, takes on the task of giving another classic pop combo the critical biography they deserve with Bee Gees: Children of the World (Nine Eight Books, £22). He makes a strong case for the brothers Gibb as pop’s greatest ever misfits, a band everybody listened to but no one understood.
One of the year’s most intriguing musical autobiographies is Thurston Moore’s Sonic Life (Faber, £20, which skimps on personal insight but dives deep into his obsessional interest in underground music that ultimately fed into Moore’s own groundbreaking guitar pieces for
race of famous folk putting their names to ghosted thrillers.
In the meantime, a more pleasing development is the news that the Crime Writers’ Association is introducing new Dagger awards to recognise subgenres that have muscled their way back into the mainstream after decades out of fashion: the domestic suspense novel and the traditional plot-centred whodunit. My vote for the former category would go to Olivia Kiernan’s deliciously Highsmithian The End of Us (Riverrun, £16.99), about a debt-ridden GP contemplating a scheme to fake his wife’s death for the insurance; for the latter, Tom Mead’s 1930s-set theatrical mystery The Murder Wheel (Head of Zeus, £20), which bears every sign of being possessed by the ghost of the master of the locked-room mystery, John Dickson Carr.
If there were a Dagger for longest crime novel, this year – as so often – it would go to Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling) for The Running Grave (Sphere, £25), a 960-page tale of an evil cult that would have gripped twice as hard at half the length. Look at Ian Rankin, in whose flavoursome ebook-only novella The Rise (Amazon, £1.99) the multimillionaire inhabitants of a chichi residential tower are the suspects in the murder of their concierge: it proves that an amuse-bouche can be as memorable as a banquet.
If any crime novel merited its high page-count this year, it was Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice (Fleet, £20), a genuine epic that seems to leave no corner of New Delhi unexplored as it unfolds the tale of Sunny, the conflicted scion of a criminal dynasty that makes the Corleones look like the Larkins. If the character of a nation is expressed by its criminals, here is an indispensable text for understanding modern India.
Another thriller that casts a beady eye on the workings of the modern world is Martin Cruz Smith’s Independence Square (Simon & Schuster, £18.99), in which veteran investigator Arkady Renko hunts a missing anti-Putin activist in Ukraine on the eve of last year’s invasion. Both Cruz Smith and
Renko suffer from Parkinson’s disease, and yet, hearteningly, both are on almost as good form as they were in the masterly Gorky Park, four decades ago.
To say Mick Herron has surpassed himself with The Secret Hours (Baskerville, £22) would suggest that naming the best spy thriller of the year is a no-brainer. But it would be a photo finish with Matthew Richardson’s blissfully ingenious The Scarlet Papers (Michael Joseph, £14.99), in which a nonagenarian ex-spy reflects on half a century’s worth of labyrinthine missions, while various factions compete to suppress or preserve her explosive memoirs.
It was a bumper year, too, for historical crime fiction. SG MacLean’s superb The Winter List (Quercus, £20) explored the merciless persecution of Cromwell’s supporters following the Restoration; MacLean brilliantly evokes the texture of the past. The same is true of Leonora Nattrass, who in her wonderfully evocative Scarlet Town (Viper, £16.99) confects a quintessentially 18th-century plot that sees the only two voters in a rotten borough murdered.
But it was in Dennis Lehane’s masterly Small Mercies (Abacus, £20) that thrills and historical recreation combined most potently. The story of an Irishwoman searching for her missing teenage daughter in the melting pot of 1970s Boston against the backdrop of the desegregation bussing crisis, it uses personal tragedies to illuminate the wider tragedy of the fissures that divided America – and still do.
Deepti Kapoor’s New Delhi crime dynasty makes the Corleones look like the Larkins