You wouldn’t have thought it would be possible to write a dull book about such a rich life as Madonna’s, but Mary Gabriel manages it. She also spends 800 pages managing it, which compounds the achievement.
I haven’t made a career out of reading biographies of pop’s most dogged female performer, but I do remember enjoying her brother Christopher Ciccone’s 2008 book, My Life With My Sister Madonna (one of those It Does What It Says On The Tin tomes).
My suspicions were raised when I read an advance review online which called Gabriel’s book “thoughtful”, which I interpreted as “the kind of book you only need to read three pages before it sends you off into a blameless sleep”.
The research is, like her subject, dogged, and yet it is completely without style. I also suspect her grasp of popular culture is something that doesn’t come naturally to her. She gets the venue of Madonna’s first London performance wrong (it was the Camden Palace, not Le Beat Route, and I was there), and she writes about Live Aid as though she has just heard of it.
She is also extraordinarily non-judgemental; surely one of the joys of reading a biography is reading what a truly great writer has to say about the legendary missteps of someone’s career: in Gabriel’s book, the appalling film Swept Away is treated as a minor aberration rather than a proper career interruption, while she misses an opportunity to award Die Another Day a medal for being the worst James Bond song in perpetuity.
There are some little gems towards the beginning of the book, where Gabriel uses found quotes to build a portrait of an ambition built from the tragedy of Madonna’s mother’s death, but it is not enough to turn this into an interesting book on any level, as this doorstep of a biography then turns into a litany of diary items. Madonna makes a record, chooses a creative partner, buys a new dress, becomes a goddess feminist icon, and then probably goes shopping in Whole Foods. Honestly, you could do worse than read Wikipedia instead. It’s certainly a lot cheaper.
Madonna: A Rebel Life by Mary Gabriel (Coronet, £35) is out on Tuesday
