Once There Was a Way: What if The Beatles Stayed Together?

This is a not a novel but a fictional biography, an ingenious mixture of real events and inventions in the lives of the Beatles from about 1968 onwards, in an alternative world in which they managed to avoid splitting up. I'm not a big reader of biographies, but this one is well done: I found it surprisingly readable.

I was born in 1954, so I grew up with the Beatles in the background, I still listen to them, and I'm reasonably well acquainted with their history. However, I'm not an obsessive fan and don't know all the details of their lives. Consequently, the maddening thing about this book is that I often can't tell what's real and what's invented (unless I do some extra research elsewhere). Major events are obvious: I know that the Beatles played at Woodstock only in this alternative world, not in ours. But I don't know enough about the minor events to distinguish truth from fiction; and truth is blended with fiction throughout.

The book is a relatively conservative exercise in imagination. Yes, there are inventions such as the Beatles playing at Woodstock and Lennon being kidnapped. But the songs mentioned are mostly real, although in our history some of them appeared on solo albums by the split-up Beatles. If the Beatles had not split up, I feel sure that they would have conceived and released more songs that never existed in our history; but I suppose that trying to imagine the titles or content of such hypothetical songs would be a bit silly.

One invention I can't swallow is the idea of a Lord of the Rings film made in 1971 by Stanley Kubrick and starring the Beatles. I don't think it would have been made, even in an alternative world, and if it had been made I think it would have flopped. The Beatles weren't suited to it, the special effects in 1971 weren't up to it, and the story would have had to be abominably compressed to fit into one film. Given an infinite number of alternative worlds, I suppose it must have happened on some of them, but surely on a very low proportion of them.

Overall, on second reading the book seems better than I remembered from last year. I'd be willing to give it 3½ stars, but I'm still reluctant to give it 4. It's rather difficult to assess, being neither a novel nor a straight biography; so I can't compare it directly with anything else.