A Double Life

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I found the story a little pedestrian and certainly not that exciting. Claire really became quite obnoxious and annoying. I wasn't rooting for her at all although I did root for her brother. It was so-so and OK for people who don't want a lot of excitement. Ten weeks. It was four separate trips that total ten weeks. One trip was four and a half weeks. That was the longest. And I worked nine to five. That’s a fair bit of time. I did a lot of work on Volume Two, but the Covid thing shut that down. I still need to go through a lot of the Eighties session tapes. There is such an atmosphere here as Claire researches and travels , takes care of her brother, goes into a kind of life catatonic state every time the police believe they’ve caught up with her errant Father . I love how its really not about whether he’s guilty or not but about how the lives he left behind him are indelibly altered. His friends who covered for him, their children and at the heart of it all Claire who watches and waits and plans.. Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. This novel looks at the aftermath of a crime and how it affected Claire and her young brother. Very few people know the truth about Claire’s real identity. Opening up to others has led to bad experiences for her and so she is very much alone, and lonely. Sometimes, it seems that life goes on, much as usual. She is a doctor in a busy practice, coping with issues, such as her brother’s reliance on prescription drugs, work issues and her obsession with her father.

Gabriela has the “double life” and the novel endeavours to explain how she has ended up in this position. Recommended to readers who enjoy domestic thrillers that aren’t too intense. This is a 3.5 but rounding up to 4 for keeping me entertained. Claire's father, Colin Spenser, did a Lord Lucan disappearance as well. His car was later found in a field abandoned with bloodstained seats. Afterwards, Claire's mother moves to a completely different locale with her children. The reader sits with thoughts of Colin's grotesque deed. Was it really Colin or was he set up some how? And where in the world has he escaped to? He has never spoken to Dylan, and in a 2021 interview with the Guardian he said that he wouldn’t want to: “There’s no point unless he wants to talk to me like a human being and get rid of the Bob Dylan persona, and be just Bob.” You wonder if he thinks he knows who that person is now, and whether writing books of such extraordinary detail has got him any closer to finding out. I remember talking to [ Good as I Been To You producer and Dylan friend] Debbie Gold about the difference between Love and Theft and Modern Times in terms of Dylan’s voice and how much better the singing is on Modern Times. It’s five years later. It shouldn’t be better. But it’s all in terms of when he took his tour break.I’m happy to say that the likeable version resurfaced later, as anyone who’s heard Theme Time Radio Hour with your host Bob Dylan can confirm.) Tempted, yes. But I’m not going to. Unfortunately, the sheer scale of the material is such that I’d literally have to start again. I did those books in good faith. I was thinking, “This is it. This is the 600 Bob Dylan songs that we know.” Now it’s 900. There are so many unknown songs that we didn’t know about, if you follow the story through the present, that would be a whole exercise in itself.

Her argument chimes with what another female philosopher, Iris Murdoch, wrote in her essay Against Dryness, where she indicted anglophone analytic philosophy for its detachment from the blood and guts of life. Murdoch’s novels, like Eliot’s, went where male-dominated academic philosophy feared to tread. We don’t get to hear much from Agnes, though what she thought about marriage and adultery would have been interesting reading. Lewes could never afford to divorce her. Eliot supplanted her nonetheless, signing herself “Mother” in letters to the Lewes’s three sons. Eliot’s literary earnings, brokered by Lewes who in effect served as her literary agent, supported Agnes, even after Lewes’s death.Shortly before that, yes. I knew that the Dylan office was cataloging some things. They were kind enough to let me see the material for Lost on the River, that pre– Basement Tapes material, when that project was being done. I helped with the documentary they were creating and I realized that there was some excavating going on if they’d turned up that type of material. It's been 26 years and Claire has never stopped looking for him. She looks for him on the streets, on trains and everywhere she goes. She spies on his friends and makes friends with their children trying to find information on him. Her brother has reacted differently and has sunk into a life of addiction. Claire is a GP working for public health. One minute she's discussing her patients and the next paragraph she's reminiscing about the ice cream her father brought her the day before he went ballistic. WTF? Eliot died aged 61 in December 1880. Cross survived to write her multivolume hagiography and lobby the church to honour her. Only in 1980 was a memorial plaque for Eliot installed at Westminster Abbey between WH Auden and Dylan Thomas. It bears a quote from Scenes of Clerical Life: “The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second something to reverence.” Carlisle’s book shows us that, happily, Mr and Mrs Lewes, though they never married, found both. I love how Flynn Berry creates and breathes life and soul into a character- in this case Claire, whose father killed her Nanny, attempted to kill her Mother then disappeared seemingly into thin air…

A Double Life ends with a BANG. The connections to book 1 are really intelligently knitted into the story. I genuinely loved the unexpected surprise I got…a perfect ending that has left me drooling for more. I would recommend you read Part of the Family first and when you get to the end, know that there is a delicious twist coming down the line in A Difficult Life. I have no idea where this series is going but I am ready to see what happens next and excited to read about the direction Charlotte Philby takes with her characters.Clinton Heylin has written eight books about Bob Dylan during the past 30 years, including the acclaimed 1991 biography Behind the Shades (which he updated in 2001 and 2011), making it seem unlikely he’d ever have anything new to say on the subject. But then the news hit in 2016 that Dylan had unloaded a 6,000-piece collection of lyric manuscripts, notebooks, photographs, letters, and audio and video materials to the George Kaiser Family Foundation, most of it never before seen by the public. People think they know me from my songs,” Bob Dylan once remarked. “You’d have to be a madman to try to figure out the characteristics of the person who wrote all those songs.” You have the classic story where Dylan tells [Robert] Shelton that he came to New York and lived as a rent boy for a few months. You know that’s a Rimbaudian fancy. At the time that he said it, he was obsessed with Arthur Rimbaud. It doesn’t tell us much about what he did in 1961, but it tells us a lot about 1966. Ingenious really is the only word I have for this novel, and that is mainly because I have previously read Part of the Family. In writing that review I said…. The musicians that played on Blonde on Blonde talked about the sessions quite a bit over the past 50 years. Their actual memories of the sessions are probably pretty compromised by this point.

Are you tempted to do new versions of your song-by-song books now that you have access to all this stuff? Plus, labeling Allen Ginsberg a "notorious homosexual" is telling. And some reference to a gay man suppressing his "pederastic yearnings." What is that all about??? The book is littered with this kind of dismissive description of people. Don't like. To his credit, Heylin pulls no punches in his pursuit, but this book ends with really the most mysterious aspect of a man whose whole aura is about mystery - the near-fatal motorcycle crash that put an abrupt in to a string a revelatory music releases and served as the impetus for a New Dylan. Tom and Gabriela have been together for years. He knows her ambitious nature and he accepts that this is Gabriela. When she is happy, he is happy. He has full trust in Gabriela and in her choices. But when Gabriela returned from Moscow, something shifted. Now as a 58 year old, I'm not even the slightest bit horrified of the antics of the young Dylan, and Mr. Heylin has found more of them for me to be nonplussed about. This book adds much richer details to Scaduto's outline. There are also new discussions of the drugs and women that Dylan used.

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There is little danger or tension. Even if you ignore the espionagey-lite bits & pretend this is straight-up women's fiction about the pressures & struggles we face at work, this book does not satisfy there either. The characters feel phoned in and unconvincing. Scenes and ideas are undeveloped. There is a tremendous amount of tell and little dialogue that isn't mundane without subtext. I'm disappointed. I’m sure Tulsa is going to lead to a flood of Dylan books about certain time periods and certain albums. Heylin also tries to understand what kind of man Dylan was. There is much that is unpleasant about him. He was a compulsive liar. He was wildly insecure. He was a compulsive philanderer who expected absolute loyalty and love from the woman in his life. He bullied and abused those who worked for him and tended to surround himself with flunkies. Heylin is brutally honest about Dylan the man. For all Heylin’s flaws – the clunkiness, the pettiness, the self-indulgence, the needless score-settling – Far Away From Myself is not just another Bob Dylan book. Indeed, it’s so all-encompassing that it is probably the last word on the singer. And how Heylin would love that.