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15/12/2005

Chronicles: Part 3 - Yes, but is it art?

Anne Ritchie concludes her review of Chronicles Volume One:

I finished reading Chronicles Volume One with a deep sense of satisfaction. I’d learnt a bit about Dylan the man, quite a lot about Dylan the artist, but I’d also relished reading a work of literature, which was stimulating and uplifting.

The structure of Chronicles Volume One works wonderfully well, beginning and ending with the dramatic breakthrough to success in New York. One of the intervening chapters, New Morning, centres round his efforts to escape the trap of fame, symbolised by his flight from Woodstock. The other, Oh Mercy, gives an intimate, detailed picture of the story behind the making of the eponymous comeback album.

Dylan’s narrative skills are – unsurprisingly – masterly. Chronicles is a page-turner, effortlessly moving between storytelling and self-analysis, with the economical detail to be expected from the man who brought you such powerful stories as Hollis Brown or Hurricane or the confessional outpourings of Blood On The Tracks.

A particular passage I like is when he describes receiving his honorary degree from Princeton. We see him restlessly waiting to receive the award, then jolted from the satisfaction at the recognition of his skills by being yet again (aged nearly 30) referred to as the conscience of his generation. He reports being so mad that he wanted to bite himself!

Descriptions of people and places enrich the narrative throughout. Telling, almost Dickensian, pen portraits include that of a Columbia PR man, and the Greenwich Village girls succinctly labelled “non-homemaker-types”.

There is a freshness in the simple imagery of the New Orleans weather. His paean to New Orleans has extra poignancy after the devastating floods of 2005, while mention of the floods of a hundred years earlier exhibits the disturbing prescience found in several of Dylan's songs.

Throughout Chronicles Volume One, the social/historical background to Dylan’s formative years is well conveyed. There is a strong sense of the ‘50s, and the Cold War paranoia, which had Dylan and his school friends practising taking cover under desks at the sound of the air-raid siren. The trial in Israel of Nazi Adolf Eichmann looms large. The cultural climate is deftly sketched, including a wonderful put-down of the type of wholesome family soap operas of the day where the characters are always overdressed, even in the home.

Chronicles Volume Two soon, Mr D, please.

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