Observer Review: Mary By Andrew Morton Essay, Research Paper

Immaterial girlMadonnaAndrew MortonO & # 8217 ; Mara Books? 18, pp256A really uneven and lovely small book I own, called I Dream Of Madonna, collects adult females & # 8217 ; s histories of the darks the all-singing all-dancing all-provoking cultural beacon set up cantonment in their deepest subconscious.Heady material, but I can crush it. A adult male I know, non even a journalist, late had a incubus about Madonna. He & # 8217 ; d be questioning her, believe he & # 8217 ; vitamin D finished, and set away his Dictaphone, merely for another & # 8216 ; Madonna & # 8217 ; to turn up and the whole procedure start up once more. By his history, nevertheless many times he & # 8217 ; d thought he & # 8217 ; d & # 8216 ; done & # 8217 ; her, Madonna merely kept coming back, like some many-headed MTV hydra.Having interviewed Madonna myself, my friend & # 8217 ; s & # 8216 ; female horse made me giggle. ( We should all be so lucky to hold all the Madonnas show up. ) However, reading Andrew Morton & # 8217 ; s new life on La Ciccone, I couldn & # 8217 ; t assist but theorize how much better it might hold been if the writer had had the same incubus as my friend.At least so Morton might hold been able to give some original penetration into The Little Woman Who Could ( And Did ) alternatively of this amazingly bland literary ticker-tape parade of yellowing National Enquirer cuttings, interspersed with crabbed asides from side-lined & # 8216 ; friends & # 8217 ; and co-workers, non to advert ex-lovers scampering over with their poisoned Valentines. & # 8216 ; If she were a picture, she would be an abstract by Picasso. She has so many faces, & # 8217 ; drones ex-beau Vanilla Ice ( FYI, a white-rapping failed Eminem ) . & # 8216 ; She was so tight she squeaked & # 8217 ; , complains another lover, Jim Albright ( who started out as Madonna & # 8217 ; s escort ) .Like so many of Morton & # 8217 ; s sources, these two end up stating far more about themselves, their subterranean motivations and acrimonious letdowns, than they do about Madonna. Which could explicate why the book fails. With Morton & # 8217 ; s best known work, his Diana book, one at least came off the feeling that Di herself was skulking and whispering in the shadows & # 8211 ; Cherchez La Femme with binge-eating syndrome and tiaras. With Morton & # 8217 ; s Madonna book, a tome which manages to be more thorough but less entertaining than a second-on-the-bill Vanity Fair interview, it is more a instance of Cherchez La Point.We get down with Morton taking a drive from JFK airdrome into Manhattan, merely as his topic did so many old ages ago. & # 8216 ; The dramatic skyline glisters, alight with promises, dripping with possibilities & # 8217 ; , Morton growls moonily, like a mush fiction author with a heavy deadline.New York sorted, it & # 8217 ; s clip to hear all about & # 8230 ; Morton! : & # 8216 ; A biographer is a personality investigator, & # 8217 ; he muses. & # 8216 ; A literary dick seeking for hints, proving alibis, and garnering grounds that will assist light a character who has made an feeling on our world. & # 8217 ; Finally, we arrive at Madonna, but far from the topic being & # 8216 ; illuminated & # 8217 ; , it & # 8217 ; s as if visible radiations that have ever been on are being clicked off one by one.It & # 8217 ; s non that it & # 8217 ; s non all here & # 8211 ; it, droningly, exhaustingly, is. The Catholic

childhood, the mother who died young from breast cancer, the dance training, the switch to music, the struggle, the success, the Sex book, the sex talk, the backlash, the tears. The men, the women, the marriages, the abortions. The ambition, the audacity, the bad decisions, the worst movies. The children, the comeback, the abduction by aliens. I made that last one up, because I thought you might be getting bored. That’s the point really. With Madonna, Morton achieves the implausible. He takes an interesting woman and an astonishing life and manages to make both seem incredibly boring.Once you get used to Morton’s pace (dull plod, with occasional snooze), it becomes quite amusing joining him on the journey, a bit like watching someone dragging a dead body around, trying to find some place to hide it. Even luminaries such as Madonna exes Sean Penn and Warren Beatty are reduced to flailing around like disenfranchised phantoms in the shallows of Morton’s blandly automatic insights.Elsewhere, in this ‘unauthorised’ expose, the ‘revelations’ wash over the reader like a vast dirty condom-strewn tide, all the more ugly for their banality. Madonna has had lots of sex. She has had abortions. She has been known to be insecure, pestering her menfolk with telephone calls. Morton might as well have told us that ‘Madonna has been known to menstruate’, so routine, so feminine, so human, are all of these experiences.Meanwhile, Madonna herself is smothered in gamey autograph-hunting flattery (’An artistic alchemist who was able to blend creativity and controversy in equal measure, and so create commercial gold’) which does little more than reveal that Morton would rather deal in abstract tosh-prose than get up close to his subject. Similarly, Morton’s take on her music hints that he might be the only human being alive never to have heard any of it. Rather painfully, he doggedly describes her songs like someone listening through a cup pressed up against an outside wall.Ultimately, all you learn from this book is that Madonna has a lot of ‘friends’ with big nasty mouths. Only once did I catch my breath and really feel what was being written, and that was when Morton describes Madonna looking into her mother’s open casket. To the five-year-old Madonna, her mother’s mouth ‘looked funny,’ and she only realised later that that was because it had been sewn up.We could have done with more of this, more Madonna the real, hurting person, less Madonna the strutting famous monster thing. For, whatever she is or isn’t, for all the monsterfication of her that has gone on over the years if nothing else, Madonna remains one of the sanest mega-celebrities the world has ever seen, and a biographer has a duty to ‘illuminate’ that. With Morton’s Madonna, the problem is not that he’s never met his subject, but that he clearly has no special feel for her legend or her life. Maybe Morton didn’t need to have the same nightmare as my friend, but it might have helped if he had dreamt of her at all.