One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time
by Craig Brown
Summary
There are hundreds of Beatles books, and Craig Brown's wager is that the only honest form left is the kaleidoscope: one hundred and fifty odd short chapters, vignettes, lists, diaries, footnotes, counterfactuals and collisions, arranged so that the most familiar story in popular culture becomes strange and funny and sad again.
The method finds its material at the edges. Jimmie Nicol, the deputising drummer who was a Beatle for thirteen days and spent the rest of his life disappearing from it. The fans who queued, screamed, married and kept the scrapbooks, allowed to speak at length. Jane Asher's genteel parents with a Beatle in the spare room; the Maharishi weekend; Brian Epstein's loneliness rendered without prurience; a running census of what the Beatles' childhood homes and school reports later sold for; the tribute acts, the lookalikes, the men who were nearly in the band, the aristocrats and chancers who attached themselves. Brown has a parodist's ear, decades of Private Eye behind him, and the book is continually laugh aloud funny, but the comedy keeps opening trapdoors: the deaths, the lawsuits, the fame that ate everyone who touched it. The four Beatles themselves emerge in glimpses, funny, cruel, exhausted, ordinary, more vividly than in most books that keep them centre frame.
It is also, quietly, a book about time, sixty years collapsing chapter to chapter, the reader watching four provincial boys become the century's weather.
Around six hundred and fifty pages that read like two hundred.
Best for readers who think they cannot face another Beatles book, which is exactly whom it was written for.
Historical Context & Significance
One Two Three Four won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2020, the judges calling it a joyous, irreverent celebration of the Beatles and a profound book about success and failure, and the win itself made a point: the prize for serious nonfiction going, in a plague year, to a book that is frequently hilarious, published for the fiftieth anniversary of the band's breakup.
Brown had built the method on royalty first: Ma'am Darling, his ninety nine glimpses of Princess Margaret, established the mosaic form this book perfects, biography by accumulation of angles, the subject reflected in everyone they dazzled or damaged.
Reviewers called it a group portrait in vignettes and the best book anyone had written about the band, praise repeated by critics who had said the same of Lewisohn's scholarship, which is the point: they are not competing. Brown's subject is not the Beatles but Beatlemania as a weather system, and his follow up, A Voyage Around the Queen, applied the instrument to Elizabeth II. The form now has imitators everywhere.