Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History [Hardcover]

The more I reread Devin McKinney's book about the meanings of the Beatles the more I admire it, and the more I disagree with it.

I first read it and reviewed it for Amazon a few years ago. At the time, I gave it four stars and a rather defensive review, saying that I agreed with much of what McKinney said and thought it was a lot better than the other reviewer thought it. I now disagree strongly with McKinney, but I admire him all the more for writing what he wrote, because this book truly prompts you to think about the band and what they did.

McKinney's approach is not that of a scholar. Let's face it, the far more hyped Ian Macdonald was no scholar either. He did little or no original research and for all his forensic brilliance as a commentator, his basic thesis (that the Beatles, for all their wonderfulness, presided over and helped to cause the total collapse of Western civilisation) is at best questionable. McKinney's scholarship is actually far more searching; he goes to the bootlegs and inspired at least one reader (this one) to seek them out; he talks about the band the way a poet would, and his suggestive and imaginative attitude can sometimes be far more illuminating - even when we disagree, maybe even especially when we disagree - than that of a conscientious but basically uninspired chronicler like Mark Lewisohn. Lewisohn's works are essential if you want to know what the Beatles actually did, but there is a plethora of Beatles books telling us what they did and very little good writing about why it matters that they did it.

McKinney provides such writing. He is brilliant about the movies; his meditations on A Hard Day's Night and Help! are worth the price of the book, pointing out how the former derives much of its longevity and power from the way it depicts the Beatles not as worshipped stars but as despised and neglected objects of contempt. I wouldn't have thought that anyone could make Help! seem like a good film, but McKinney is interested in its very badness and makes it seem significant.

It's the way that McKinney can seize on, amplify and illuminate the things that people normally find annoying about the band that gives his work such electric energy and interest, even when I am compelled to disagree with him. For example, like most American critics he thinks that Sgt Pepper is wildly overrated, and in reaction to that he himself overrates (I think) the White Album. Like many critics, McKinney misses the shadows in Sgt Pepper - the moments of doubt, fear, failure and compassion - and writes it off as a consoling fantasy, but unlike most critics he goes on to proclaim the White Album to be the best thing the Beatles ever did. My problem with this is not that he underrates Sgt Pepper, but that the White Album, for all its moments of genius and its conceptual integrity (it's an album about breakdown and fragmentation, so okay, it stands to reason that it should itself be broken-down and fragmented), has too many merely crap songs. I still think that Savoy Truffle, Piggies, Rocky Raccoon, Wild Honey Pie and a few others are basically tedious wastes of time. (A song about a box of chocolates? George, what were you thinking?)

But even when McKinney is (I think) wrong, he is stimulatingly wrong. His coverage of the Paul-is-dead myth is great. The bits about lost songs that some people think might be by the Beatles has haunted me for years, so much so that I had to go and track the songs down myself. If McKinney adds nothing to our sense of what exactly the Beatles did, what they recorded and when and where they did it, it's because he was not trying to do that. What he has done is much more difficult; he has enhanced our sense of what the Beatles can mean. I retract my earlier, more lukewarm review. This is one of the very best books ever written about the Beatles. If Amazon would let me give it five stars, I would happily do so.

As a very big Beatles fan, I've been collecting books on Beatle topics for years, from the carreer-spanning biographies (Shout!, Love you make etc.) and discographies and photobooks to the ultra-detailed books by Lewisohn, Sulpy and Madinger and the wonderful Way beyond compare book. As an academic, I can take a good deal of analysis, and digging into the collective and individual minds of my favourite subjects is a joy. This book, however, is simply one bridge too far. Pretentious vocabulary, inept reasoning (the toilet metaphor in the first chapters is neither scholarly or original) and vacuous, rambling prose define this book. I read scholarly prose every day, and to my opinion, those who will hail this as a major step forward in Beatle or popular music scholarship have clearly never read Ian McDonald's wonderful tome "Revolution in the head", which, by the way, is far better documented. A scholar's approach should be one that clarifies its subject, not one that obscures it. This will be the first Beatles book that I definitely will not bother reading again.