"The Age of Bowie" by Paul Morley is a biography written from the author's perspective. Morley, being a huge fan, both illuminates and infuriates with his exuberance.
The beginning of the book comes off as cathartic for the writer and maybe does or doesn't equate to how the reader might come to grips with the death of their Bowie.
However, the first half of the book does cover the first 20 years of Bowie's life which I found very informative. I really only knew Bowie after Hunky Dory, his third album. His early influences and recordings were an unknown to me.
Morley has a unique writing style that tends to run on. Once you get into the pace of his writing style it's easier to follow where he's going. It reminded me of how Burroughs can confound the reader but I'm in no way comparing the two writers just the difficult pace of the writing.
After getting a good understanding of where Bowie or Davie Jones came from and who influenced him in his formative years, it seems like the writer is setting up for a big payoff later in the book but the payoff never comes. His equations of how these early influences manifest in his later work seems a little weak to me.
The thing I liked most about this book is at the end of each chapter, one for each year throughout Bowie's 70's period, the author listed important or seminal recordings made by other artists of that year. These must have been favorites of the author because not all the artists listed were at the top of the charts or even popular at the time. I must say I agree with about 98% of his choices and maybe I need to go back and reevaluate some of the others.
I can see how this might put some readers off, but for me it legitimized much of my record collection.
For a novice of Bowie, one might gleem a lot of great truth in this book but for someone who has followed Bowie over his career, you may feel as I did that much of the holes in my understanding of his mindset is not sated.
Or perhaps, what was important for the writer to convey is not what I hoped I would gather from this book.
Either way, I was disappointed in the arc of the timeline. Morley trys to justify this by explaining how one can't talk about Bowie's work in a chronological order; Bowie's life has too many jump cuts between artistic periods, hence, the early influences on later artistic expressions.
I found this opinion a vail attempt to get this book written in a short period of time.
A couple of years from the late 70's were even glossed over as if nothing worth writing about, happened. This really chapped my hide as his "Berlin Period" is my favorite of all his work.
But you have to draw a line somewhere and I guess that was his. Otherwise you could make this 496 pages into a 2000 page microscopic dissection.
The last 30 years of Bowie's career/life are covered in less than the last 100 pages.
His acting career and one offs like the Queen and Jagger songs are quickly covered and given about as much attention as each of his last dozen albums. Yeah, much of his later records don't hold a candle to his 70's period but I really liked a couple of those later releases and would have liked to know more about them.
Morley's association with the "David Bowie Is" exhibition is touted and is used as the closer of the book. Most of his experiences with the exhibit are anecdotal at best and are really an unnecessary inclusion.
All in all, I liked the book ok but it only makes me want to find a more comprehensive bio from a more disassociated author.
Perhaps, an artist like Bowie very well may not be able to be contained all in one book, or even, at all.