A study of the Beatles, written with a novelist’s eye, is pure joy

One Two Three Four
CRAIG BROWN
(FOURTH ESTATE, 656 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

I’ve never been an enthusiastic Beatles fan. Especially in Liverpool, where I live, loving the Beatles comes with a side ­helping of nostalgia. I have a horror of ­nostalgia, so I was more than prepared to ­dislike Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four. But it is the most engaging, most surprising, most thought-provoking and purely enjoyable book I’ve read in ages.
Brown has as many ways to tell a story as the Beatles had to write a song. Some chapters here view the subject from the back of the stalls and others from the most intimate backstage areas. There are reflections on the price and the weirdness of Beatles memorabilia. There’s a counterfactual chapter in which Brown imagines that it was Gerry and the Pacemakers instead of the Beatles who “shook the world”. In one heartbreaking section he walks you backwards in time from Brian Epstein’s autopsy to the meeting that began his unravelling.

One of Brown’s previous books, One to One, is a catalogue of surprising true-life encounters – like that time Marianne Faithfull discussed drug smuggling with W. H. Auden. Here, he finds the beautifully circular story of how Paul McCartney was inspired to write “She’s Leaving Home” by a newspaper article about a missing girl, without knowing that he’d met her in the flesh a few years before. The girl subsequently recognised herself in the song.