”John” is
Cynthia’s second book about John Lennon. The first one, “A Twist
of Lennon”, was published in 1978. Cynthia says she wants to write
a new book because she has so many incidents she couldn’t have
written about before, and she has so many feeling she didn’t know
how to express.
Cynthia
writes about the relationship between her, John and Julian, the
daily life as a Beatle-wife, the life they shared, and the life
after the divorce and the shooting at the 8th of 1980.
The book begins in the early days, when Cynthia and John met at
art school. This is the funniest part to read; John as a
fascinating though guy with romantic back pages, when they fell in
love and their relationship, and the rise to fame. Then comes
Julian, the fame, the drugs and the following, continual distance
between the parts in the little family.
It’s
always interesting to read about the private person John Lennon.
The man had great musical skills, and such a complex way to be.
This books says a lot about the private person Lennon, but it
dosen’t give you the greatest news of all time and unknown facts;
it mostly make my impressions and thoughts I had about him from
before stronger. The really nice thing about this book is that
it’s very honest, and you don’t get the perfect and always-nice
picture of John that others often give, among them Yoko. When this
book came out , the newspapers wrote that Lennon was a man who hit
his wife, and that he had a cold relationship to his son Julian.
This isn’t really big news either. But it’s still heartbreaking to
read about Julian's want for a daddy, and John and Yoko's
treatment on Cynthia and Julian.
But the
thing I find most irritating about this book, isn’t just Cynthia’s
naive attitude, but also all the mistakes about the facts. The
faults is to find in geography, dates and years. She claims All My
Loving was written for her by John, but this song is written by
Paul alone. She also says the EP Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny
Lane didn’t get to number one at once, but it never got to number
one at all.
Cynthia
says the Beatles and Brian Epstein signed a contract in December
of of 1961, and that Brian would get 25% of the profits. That’s
wrong; their first was signed in January 1962, and Epstein's share
was 10%. Epstein didn’t sign the contract that time, but signed a
new one in October of 1962, where he got 25%. Cynthia writes that
the Beatles offered Ringo Starr the job as a drummer when they
heard he’d left his band Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. This is
not right; Ringo was offered the job while he still was a
Hurricane, and left the band. She also writes that the Beatles in
the early day used to play songs by Cliff Richard!
There is
many interesting facts about John’s family, though there are some
mistakes there too. Cynthia claims among other things that John’s
aunt Elisabeth divorced for her husband Charles and married the
dentist Robert Sutherland. But it wasn’t like that – Charles died,
and she married Sutherland many years later.
There are
many faults like these, but the facts aren’t really the most
important things in this book – you can read facts in other books.
If you
want to know more about the person Lennon, this is a good book to
read.
Written
by L. Englebraaten, translated by S.B. Ringstad
