John Lennon: The Life, By Philip Norman

Anyone writing a book about the Beatles is entering one of publishing's more crowded markets. But Philip Norman isn't just anyone, and his biography of the band's most troubled, problematic and mythologised member is no mere exercise in milking a subject for which, nearly half a century on, the world's fascination shows no sign of waning.

As the author of what is widely regarded as the best "straight" Beatles biography – Shout!, published in 1981 – Norman set about his Lennon project five years ago with impeccable credentials. If anything, the result is even more impressive than one might have hoped for. This will surely come to be regarded as the definitive portrait of the Beatle who, to a much greater extent than his three band-mates, needed to be helped down from his pedestal. Norman carries out the task with a kind of quiet heroism.

Neither hagiography nor hatchet job, John Lennon: the life is beautifully written and acutely perceptive, and the story it has to tell is epic. Generous but not to a fault, it runs to 817 pages, every one justified. This may be the shortest long book you will ever read.

The insights are so telling and a mass of evidence so skilfully presented that even a figure as outwardly familiar as Lennon emerges in a whole new light. Norman doesn't stint on showing his ugly side, but we're not left in any doubt as to why he sometimes behaved the way he did. While there are some start-ling revelations of fact, the real power of the book lies in its scoops of interpretation.

Much more a study of an emotional journey than a musical one, this book might easily have been called "The Tragedy of John Lennon". Has anyone so acclaimed in public ever experienced such pain in private? The victim of four catastrophic bereavements by the time he was 26, Lennon went through life in an almost permanent state of turmoil, much of it delirious, a lot more horribly anguished. We all knew Lennon's creative genius came at a very heavy price, but Norman lays bare just how much that suffering amounted to.

Norman never loses sight of the highly unusual family circumstances of Lennon's upbringing, and the degree to which they determined what came after. He really had two mothers – his natural mother Julia, and her sister Aunt Mimi, into whose rather more responsible care he passed aged six when his parents split up.

In many ways, Lennon's childhood in 1940s and 1950s suburban Liverpool was idyllic, and much more bourgeois than he ever let on. It's a world that Norman, with his awareness of the nuances of the English class system, evokes superbly, and takes his time over. Lennon's first meeting with Paul McCartney, performing at a church fete in 1957 when they were both in their mid-teens, does not occur until page 107; it's page 286 before we get to "Love Me Do".

Mischief-maker, gang-leader, a devourer of books, Lennon was, according to Norman, a real-life Just William who burst with energy and inquisitiveness. Mimi and her husband Uncle George gave the little rebel all the security he needed, and he always had Julia down the road when he wanted her.

When Lennon was 14, his uncle died, and he received his first jolt of incomprehensible loss. But far worse was to follow three years later when Julia, walking to the bus-stop after visiting Mimi, was run over and killed. Lennon had adored her – to the extent, Norman reveals, of a sexual attraction that in later life he spoke about with Yoko Ono, in particular an encounter when lying on a bed with Julia that might have led to something, but did not.

What of Lennon's father, Alfred? A drifter who disappeared to sea and worked as a kitchen porter, he played no part in Lennon's life between infancy and the height of his 1960s fame. His attempts to re-establish relations, and the way matters were ultimately resolved, have a poignancy all their own in a book of many sadnesses.

Of these, the death of Stuart Sutcliffe, the gifted art-college friend who was a Beatle during their Hamburg days, is especially dark because of the role that Lennon may have played in it. Did an inexplicable assault that Lennon launched on Sutcliffe contribute to the fatal collapse he suffered at the age of 21? In an interview, McCartney downplays it. But the suspicion lingers.

While in no way can Lennon be blamed for the suicide of Brian Epstein in 1967 – a further devastation in a life blighted by them – it was the Beatles manager's misfortune to have been in love with Lennon, and for that love to be unrequited. In common with the way Lennon treated almost everyone close to him, he could on occasion be appallingly cruel, and Epstein felt it more deeply than most.

Nobody was on the receiving end of Lennon's callousness quite like his first wife Cynthia, or – this does seem unforgivable – the son she bore him, Julian. The timing of the marriage, just as Beatlemania was taking off, was disastrous. Given the turbulence of Lennon's life, and the drug-taking that she largely declined to share with him, the partnership was always doomed.

Even with Yoko, his true soul-mate, he was subject to appalling bouts of jealousy and insecurity. Neither did the post-Beatle period of primal-scream therapy seem to have much effect, given the 18-month "lost weekend" that soon followed when he and Yoko were apart and Lennon was letting rip with friends on the West Coast. Only in the last five years of his life, living quietly in New York, devoting his time to bringing up his son Sean, did Lennon find any measure of contentment. And who knew that in the summer of 1980, a few months before his death, he discovered sailing, helping to crew a yacht to Bermuda and distinguishing himself when a storm blew up?

Norman gives Yoko a very fair hearing. Vilified for supposedly causing the Beatles' break-up, she is revealed to have resisted Lennon's initial approaches. She, as much as he, was behind their temporary separation. The work they did together on Double Fantasy, the album they were recording at the time Lennon was shot, was testimony to her capacity to nurture him as a person and as an artist. A few records are set straight: it was Julia not Mimi who gave him his first guitar. John, not Ringo, coined the phrase, "a hard day's night". The Beatles didn't smoke dope at Buckingham Palace when they went to receive their MBEs. Obsessives will be gratified to know the make and number plate of the car that killed Julia.

Norman says he set out to write a biography not of "a pop person, but of a major, towering presence in his century". He has triumphed resoundingly.

The best Beatles books

Hunter Davies scored first in 1968 with an authorised, inside-track portrait, 'The Beatles'. Heavyweight critical discussion began in earnest in 1973 with 'Twilight of the Gods' by musicologist Wilfred Mellers. Philip Norman's comprehensive account of the band and its times, 'Shout!', first appeared in 1981. Critic Ian MacDonald's incisive song-by-song analysis, 'Revolution in the Head', came in 1994. In the same year, producer George Martin revealed the secrets of 'Sgt Pepper' in 'Summer of Love'.