Bono’s memoir is as rambling, fascinating and maddening as he is
In the book that journalist Bill Flanagan wrote after embedding with the Irish rock band U2 during their most fertile creative period, 1995’s “U2 at the End of the World,” Flanagan told a joke about why James Joyce had to leave Ireland to write “Ulysses”: Because if he’d stayed he would’ve talked it.
I found myself recalling this fragment of a book I read a quarter-century ago as I made my way through Bono’s “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” the fascinatingly (and occasionally maddeningly) discursive memoir of the lightning-rod U2 frontman, a 62-year-old rock star almost as infamous for his talking as he is famous for his singing. The man with the perpetually sunglassed face and soaring voice is also, as you probably know, an agitator who has devoted at least as many of his 21st-century hours to AIDS, debt relief and anti-poverty campaigning as he has to music.
That successful second career is a reason someone who isn’t a rabid U2 fan might find value in his book. Celebrity do-gooders will and should be greeted with skepticism, but it’s tough to name another who has so successfully advanced from thrilling but largely ineffectual public condemnations of social ills to doing the tedious, unsexy, year-over-year, administration-overadministration work of building relationships with people who hold the levers of power. Even when, especially when, those people are George W. Bush or Rupert Murdoch.
“You don’t have to agree on everything if the one thing you do agree on is important enough,” writes Bono, a lesson he got from one of his singer/ agitator mentors, Harry Belafonte. Love the guy, hate him or just wish he would shut up - familiar emotions even to a U2 fan as wearily devout as your humble reviewer - you can’t say his activism is of the lapel-pin variety.
He’s been annoying people, not always for honorable reasons, at least since he leaped into the audience during U2’s set at Live Aid in 1985. And once he learned that the fortune raised by that star-packed charity concert was barely enough to cover the weekly interest its African-nation beneficiaries were paying to their Western debtors, he changed his strategy. His self-deprecating (really!) account of how he and his partners, over the course of a two-year lobbying effort, got the 43rd president to ask Congress for a historic $15 billion commitment to fight AIDS in Africa and how he abstained from criticizing the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq in the bargain - makes up two of the book’s most compelling chapters. (In a moment when it appeared the Bush administration wouldn’t deliver, George Soros accused Bono of having “sold out for a plate of lentils.”)
But that’s not what most readers will be here for. Nor will they expect, or find, much “Hammer of the Gods”style debauchery in the remembrances of a guy who’s been in a band with the same three dudes for 45 years and married to his high school sweetheart for 40; both relationships he reflects upon with candor and humility. Like the memoirs of his pals Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen, “Surrender” is more introspective than salacious or score-settling, and proof that the tunesmith who wrote it also speaks fluent prose.