 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Chronicles, Volume 1
By Bob Dylan
Simon & Schuster $39.95
In 1961, overawed by the legendary Columbia Records and willing to sign the first contract that was put before him, Bob Dylan, folk singer ('I told him it was handed down songs') from Illinois told the publicity guy he'd jumped a freight train, Woody Guthrie style, to get to New York.
In fact he'd come across the country in a four-door '57 Impala, 'a 24 hour ride, dozing most of the way in the back seat, making small talk. My mind fixed on hidden interests...'
In Greenwich Village he found a 'subterranean cavern' - familiar words? - and the rest is history, recalled here in a fascinating, often witty memoir that shows the Bobster well capable of narrative coherency.
The Line of Beauty
By Alan Hollinghurst
Picador $28.00
The winner of this year's Man Booker Prize for literature, Hollinghurst's fourth novel charts the sexual coming-of-age of recent graduate Nick Guest in the posh London home of university chum Toby Fedden, whose father is a conservative MP striving to enter Margaret Thatcher's cabinet. His mother is simply rich.
The 'line of beauty' applies not to cocaine, as one might think, but to the pursuit of architectural perfection.
Unnecessarily guilty in a household where everyone has secrets, Nick misses out on lust object Toby but goes down the garden path with an experienced black man named Leo, met through a personal ad, to whom he pays 'the kind of homage with his tongue and lips that he'd dreamed of paying for years to a whole catalogue of other men'.
The tale is nicely paced and penned, but at 500 pages it seems to be much ado about very little of interest these days.
 Oh, Play That Thing
By Roddy Doyle
Jonathan Cape $49.95
Roddy (The Commitments) Doyle has penned four other novels, including A Star Called Henry, the forerunner to this volume, in which he introduced the streetwise, mid-1920s Irish republican, Henry Smart, who fled after falling foul of his comrades.
Arriving in New York, he sails past the Statue of Liberty to begin a wild rollercoaster of a narrative whose energy never flags.
America is not such an easy place to make a living and Henry's old survival skills come in useful as he walks the streets as a sandwich-board man, runs bootleg liquor and, in a wild flight of literary fantasy, becomes jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong's token white minder. Minus a leg and his second wife, he'll be set to ride again in the final part 3.
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