Bowie brought to book
The idea behind John O’Connell’s Bowie’s Books is a truly terrific one; its execution, less so. All the same, there is enough insight and perception here for this to be a must-buy for anyone interested in the intersection between music and literature, or indeed the army of Bowie aficionados, which seems only to have grown in number and commitment since his death in January 2016, at the age of 69.
While Bowie was still alive, but withdrawn entirely from public life, he was asked for an interview to support the touring exhibition David Bowie Is. He refused, but offered something that was in its own way more useful: a list of 100 books that he loved and that had inspired him, albeit without any further context or explanation. Some of the references were obvious; Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was the inspiration behind his 1974 album Diamond Dogs, which in turn arose from his pique at being refused permission by Orwell’s widow Sonia to adapt the novel into a musical, and A Clockwork Orange was one of the major cultural influences on his Ziggy Stardust character. Others were more obscure. Why, for instance, did Bowie cite Rupert Thomson’s 1996 fourth novel The Insult, Tom Stoppard’s 2002 Russian drama trilogy The Coast of Utopia and The Beano as being his favourite books? What did he mean?
It is easy to see why O’Connell, a music critic who interviewed Bowie in 2002, was drawn to this particular subject. Although he does not refer to it explicitly, he is following in the footsteps of Thomas Wright’s Oscar’s Books, in which the author attempted to piece together an alternative biography of Wilde’s life through his library, both catalogued and speculative. (Surprisingly, given the enormous similarities between the two men, there is no book by or about Wilde on this list, although it does feature Comte de Lautréamont’s 1868 Les Chants de Maldoror, one of many influences on his novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray.) The subject offers O’Connell the chance to approach Bowie’s extraordinary intellectual breadth and interest from an unusual, even oblique perspective. Had this been done as well as it could have been, it would have been the literary equivalent of Chris O’Leary’s magisterial, definitive song-by-song Bowie blog, Pushing Ahead of the Dame.
It has not been, but this is for two distinct reasons, one of which is O’Connell’s fault and one of which is not. The failing on his part comes from an inability to probe as deeply into some (admittedly obscure and difficult) texts as the reader would like, and the necessity of relating the books to specific songs in Bowie’s oeuvre. When he succeeds – as in the comparison between James Baldwin’s 1963 essay collection The Fire Next Time and the title track of Bowie’s 1993 album Black Tie, White Noise – the results are thrilling and convincing, as O’Connell marshals close reading of a book with a new appraisal of Bowie’s lyrical richness. Several of these essays are good enough to justify the book’s purchase alone.
When he fails, the results are either perfunctory – a friend believes it was “highly likely” that Bowie continued to read Private Eye when he was exiled to New York – or frustratingly superficial. Nabokov’s Lolita, for instance, is rich in black humour, sexual transgression and graced with an unreliable narrator whose charm and erudition seduce the reader, until they realise that they are dealing with a psychopath. This gulf between image and often sordid reality was a key one throughout Bowie’s work – one thinks, for instance, of Life on Mars? – but O’Connell describes the major similarity between Bowie and Nabokov being that they both lived in Switzerland at one point, and his suggestion for further listening is Bowie’s 1967 song Little Bombardier, a sad tale of a lonely war veteran being chased out of town when he forms a friendship with two children.
It would, of course, be impossible to go into lengthy detail about every book covered, but Bowie’s Books often gives a potted summary of a plot or argument, makes a tendentious comparison to some aspect of Bowie’s life or work, and then moves swiftly onto its next subject. One imagines O’Connell cursing with frustration at having to make an argument for why Bowie enjoyed, say, Jessica Mitford’s 1963 exposé on the US funeral industry The American Way of Death, and simply giving up by writing “life excited David Bowie, so it follows that he would have loved Jessica Mitford’s blackly comic, fastidiously researched exposé of corrupt practices in the American funeral industry”, before suggesting that his readers listen to Bowie’s cover of Jacques Brel’s La Mort. It all but screams “Will this do?”
The other problem with the book is nothing to do with O’Connell’s efforts, but an inevitable flaw of attempting to treat song lyrics as literature, rather than an indivisible part of the creation. When one hears the words “It’s a god-awful small affair”, “I, I will be king, and you, you will be queen” or “I’ve heard a rumour from Ground Control”, there is a thrilling, Pavlovian rush of excitement as one thinks of the magnificence of the music that brought these stories and characters to life, in thrilling, widescreen glory. Without the music, and the indelible efforts of those who were responsible for creating some of the twentieth century’s most indelible songs, one is left with poetic musings of varying levels of profundity, often beautiful and brilliant themselves. But as a great man once said, “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”, and Bowie’s Books proves that no amount of analysis can really replace the sheer joy of listening to the music once again.