Unfortunately, this book is wildly uneven in both its tone and the quality of its writing. The first chapter includes a fanciful account of an actual recent ­McCartney concert, in Liverpool. The whole experience is described as one huge flashback for both Paul and the audience:  “So dry your eyes and blow your nose, because now we’re going back to the basements of our youth. Coming full circle to those sweaty young boys, so full of life and joy and not even suspecting where all of this is about to take them.”  Yes, let’s do that. Our eyes dry in a hurry as we careen from breathless fan-boy writing to dusty travelogue descriptions of Liverpool at the turn of the 20th century, while Carlin describes some immigrants flooding in and others flooding out, “departing for the untrammeled shores of the New World.”  Yawn. Why are shores always untrammeled? No one ever seems to write about how trammeled most shores actually are these days.  What’s missing here is the voice of Paul himself. Being unauthorized, the book suffers from an overabundance of secondhand sources (and the competing flavors of each), and is studded with speculation about what Paul might have said or thought or felt.  In this first chapter alone, which is just 14 pages, Carlin has taken from the following sources: “The Beatles,” by Hun­ter Davies; “The Beatles,” by Bob Spitz; “Liverpool: Wondrous Place,” by Paul Du Noyer; “Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now,” by Barry Miles.  There is only one original interview in the chapter, with Paul’s boyhood acquaintance Tony Bramwell, who, as a constant presence in McCartney’s life, resurfaces at other points in the book. These one-on-one interviews with peripheral characters are actually the strength of this biography, since they shed glimmers of new light on familiar material.  For example, later in the book, Bramwell talks about the EMI record company’s response to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” now widely considered to be one of the greatest albums of all time. McCartney dreamed of turning it into a movie, but according to Bramwell:  “The stingy people at EMI, bless them, the people in charge of the company at the time, actually didn’t think ‘SP’ was a very good album, as such. It had already cost them so much money in the studio, they weren’t sure it was going to recoup anything, so they wouldn’t come up with the budget for the film.”  This is good stuff! Carlin deserves praise for uncovering it, and there are many similar anecdotes in the book.  But much of the writing is jarring, and important things go unexplained. Carlin has tracked down Astrid Kirchherr, the blond existentialist with the black cloth curtain. Nice to think of her again! She tells us that the Beatles were powerful and good-­looking, but we knew that already. Then Carlin continues:  “By now the Beatles had traded their ridiculous lilac jackets for black leather suits, which they wore with black T-shirts. But Astrid saw through the biker gear, and the whiff of violence that permeated the smoky air every night at the Kaiser­keller, and recognized the sweetness and intelligence glimmering just beneath the leather.”  So she sees through the leather outfits, but was she responsible for their cool collar­less suits or not? He doesn’t say. This is not an irrelevant detail. She is also described as an “inspiring photographer” when the context would seem to imply “aspiring photographer.”  Later, Carlin discusses the influence of Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager: “No more showing up to play in unwashed leather suits and wrinkled black T-shirts.” Unwashed? How would you wash a leather suit? With a sponge?  The narrative is derailed at times by bizarre random anecdotes. For example, when Paul is courting the actress Jane Asher, whom he dated for years, her father is described as a doctor with a “notorious” sense of humor who “liked to give himself injections at the dinner table, in the back of the neck, when company was at the table.” Huh? Of what? Heroin? Vitamin B-12? Is there even a vein back there? How did he do this himself with no assistance?  Thankfully, Carlin’s tone changes from rapturous and adulatory at the start to cooler and more evenhanded when he’s discussing McCartney’s post-Beatles work with Wings (we learn that Paul was, apparently inadvertently, stingy with raises and royalty payments).  But by the end of the book, Carlin has become judgmental and disapproving. He says McCartney “seems to be enacting a modern version of the legend of Narcissus, too in love with his own youthful reflection to recognize how unappealing his mature face has become.” Yikes. Ouch.  One line about McCartney, which reads like a comment from a rejected suitor, reveals the possible source of this disappointment: “He grants interviews to bloggers and alternative weeklies, even as he turns away some major magazines (and biographers).” Perhaps the author made a bid for his subject’s cooperation but was turned down.  Has Carlin deepened our understanding of McCartney’s character in this book? Or has he only darkened it? He could have written an analysis of that character from an unbiased position, which is what I think he was aiming for. But his attempts to entertain get in the way of the story. And this is an entertaining book, although flawed, filled with complaints and throbbing purple prose. Completists who have a need for every detail on the Beatles will want a copy. It would undoubtedly have been a better book with cooperation from Paul McCartney himself. But maybe not as juicy.  Illustrated. 374 pp. Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. $26  Suzanne Vega’s “Love Songs,” the first of four CDs in a series called “Suzanne Vega Close-Up,” will be released in February.  A version of this review appears in print on December 20, 2009, on Page BR9 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Cute One. Today's Paper|Subscribe
This biography aims to present Paul McCartney as more artistically and intellectually complex than the sweet and bubbly caricature we have known.