A Double Life

Product Information

Heylin is a pugnacious biographer. He battles Dylan, other biographers, memoir writers, Dylan friends, careless reporters, lying businessman and faulty memories to get to the truth of what happens. He slashes away at those he considers sloppy or wrong. This is not a voice-of-God biography. Heylin explains why he is correct and they are wrong. Gabriela has the “double life” and the novel endeavours to explain how she has ended up in this position. But he’s masterful on Dylan’s Christianity, the three-album period where this agnostic Jew who built a career on subtlety transformed himself into a one-dimensional fire ’n’ brimstone proselytiser for whom nothing was nuanced.

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. 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. Meanwhile things are moving on apace for Gabriella, after accidentally seeing her boss with two people in a restaurant in Moscow she takes a photo of the group and thinks things are a bit suspicious. Then she loses her job. Rather than tell her husband she pretends to go to work every day and then she meets Ivan and so begins her double life. Living between two men, two homes and 3 children.

Flynn Berry

In 1961 Peter Stampfel, later a founder of "Holy Modal Rounder", said that Dylan was singing traditional songs but "his singing style and phrasing were stone rhythm and blues." That is a brilliant way to explain the difference between what he was doing and what Pete Seeger or the Kingston Trio was doing.

The two women don't seem to have any connection, except that during Isobel's investigation, she meets briefly with Madeline, a former colleague of Gabriela's. This book doesn't really cover any new ground, though Heylin culled most of his "new" research from the Dylan Archives in Tulsa which he got exclusive access to. What is does is provide an in-depth look into many of the facets of Dylan's early life, growing up in Minnesota, making a name for himself in New York, the recording of Highway 61, working with what would become The Band, and of course, going electric.He knows his Star Trek too and when he met Lauren Bacall he turned into a Humphrey Bogart fanboy. Here, Dylan is also a priapic womaniser who lies for sport, a grudge-bearing dollar billionaire who speaks of himself in the third person. It seemed that stalking her father's friends and concocting stories to insinuate herself into their inner circle was her full time job. 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?