Book Review by Kerey McKenna.
This weekend, Yesterday will hit theaters, joining a club of major motion pictures that build their stories around the Beatles' song catalog. It’s a magical-realism dramedy in which a struggling musician wakes up in a world where seemingly the band The Beatles never existed. Now he has a short cut to the success bringing the world the music it didn’t know it was missing.
To coincide with this little thought experiment, I thought it would be fun to take a look at a story based on the opposite premise: not a world where The Beatles never existed, but one where they never broke up.
Now we’ve touched on works of alternate history before here at Nerds who Read, but I don’t think we’ve discussed it as a sub-genre in and of itself so I wanna hold your hand through a brief overview.
The alternate history subgenre of modern fiction is usually traced as far back as the early 1800’s (although there are examples in antiquity and into the Renaissance) with authors and historians spinning ever more elaborate stories of what might have been if history had gone awry. What if the library of Alexandria hadn’t burned? Or Columbus couldn’t get funding to sail west? What if the Nazis won World War 2? Or a famous German rocket scientist didn’t build V-2 rockets? What if half the moon was back in the USSR. Alternate history is a great jumping off point if you want to be a paperback writer. Take a point in history and just imagine if things had just played out a little differently, how there could be monumental changes. And history has already given you a cast of public domain characters.
Alternate history tends to be conjoined to science fiction/fantasy in fandom, authorship, marketing, yet slightly distanced from historical fiction (even though conventions of well-written historical fiction are what make a well-written alternate history novels). Some would even argue that certain genres such as diesel punk or my beloved steampunk usually use the pretense of existing in an alternate universe to explain their aesthetic flourishes.
Alternate history typically focuses on what-if scenarios based around military history as points of divergence to create a universe and then has lots of fun coming up with new maps and flags, as well as character arcs for historical figures that may or may not align with the history of our own world. Given this obsession with refighting decades- or centuries-old military events, a book that focuses on monumental events in pop culture as its divergence point was a breath of fresh air for the genre, even winning the 2017 Side Ways Award for excellence in alternate history literature.
Committed to the conceit that this is a non-fiction book, Bryce Zabel writes in the style of a celebrity biography covering the Beatles in the tumultuous 1970’s...before their seeming permanence well into the 21st century (always tailed by rival newcomers the Rolling Stones).
No, the point of divergence isn’t a certain John Lennon skipping a gallery opening and thereby not meeting a certain avant garde artist...
Rather, the point of divergence in this tale is that the 1968 interview with John Lennon and Paul McCartney that Johnny Carson tried to arrange in real life, only to have it fall through, actually happened in this alternate universe. After their set on The Tonight Show, John and Paul join Johnny and Ed for a night on the town, where the two veteran showman provide the world-weary and feuding musicians with a bit of advice about maintaining a working relationship in show biz.
While this pep talk helps, not everything is strawberry fields forever for the boys from Liverpool. They struggle with their egos, differing artistic directions, familial pressures, and turning Apple Records from a 1960’s counterculture hangout into an actual business. I was surprised to learn how many of the stories of the chaos at Apple Records’ early days, chiefly flushing money down the toilet by a supposed wunderkind producer, as well as invasion by the Hell’s Angels biker gang, actually happened.
However, despite all the helter skelter around their new business, Paul McCartney and John Lennon took Johnny Carson’s and Ed McMahon’s advice about “showing up for each other” and the pair manage to check their egos sufficiently to overcome the challenges that come at the Fab Four, and even take on greater challenges.
Instead of cutting the album Abbey Road in 1969 and taking a quick picture of the band strolling outside of the titular London Studio, their next album is called Everest and the cover art is the band boldly strolling...onto the stage at Woodstock.
From here on the plot creates a fictional Beatles career path by using the solo individual Beatles’ careers and song books with hypothetical Beatles projects to weave a world in which Beatlemania never ended.
The personalities and tensions of the real world group are still there but moving from crisis to crisis (like working under the tender mercies of Stanley Kubrick to star in and score a Lord of the Rings adaptation, or a rough and tumble recording trip to Nigeria at the insistence of Paul) it seems that the Beatles can only get by with a little help from their friends...each other.
So if you sometimes wonder what if the Beatles didn’t just let it be with their last album and kept on writing and performing music together, check out Once there Was A Way.
Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.
