Listening the other day to Ray Connolly being interviewed by Tim Haigh on BooksPodcast about his novella "Sorry, Boys, You Failed The Audition", I remembered that it is well worth reading.
There have been earlier attempts to evoke the Beatles in imaginative ways, some of which I'll discuss below, but Connolly has the distinct advantage of having known the group well, especially John Lennon - he's also written a biography of Lennon and, according to the critic Philip French, the protagonist played by David Essex in Connolly's film That'll Be the Day was based in part on John. (I haven't seen this claim made by anyone else but Jim McLaine's relationship with his mother does seems to resemble that between Lennon and his stern-but-loving Aunt Mimi.)
With the additional advantage of coming from the same area, Connolly has the trick of the group members' individual voices in his novella in a way that some others, including the American writer Mark Shipper, in an otherwise creditable comic account of the group's rise and fall, cannot manage quite so convincingly; small wonder that in the podcast Connolly couldn't help admitting, in response to the interviewer's praise, that he was quite pleased with the book himself.
