John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs, Ian Leslie, Faber & Faber, £25.

In July 1967, at the behest of John Lennon, the four Beatles – together with their loved ones and a few fixers and hangers-on – flew to Athens. From there they chartered a yacht and set sail for an island in the Aegean, which Lennon planned to buy. ‘We’re all going to live there, perhaps forever, just coming home for visits,’ he told the Beatles’ authorised biographer Hunter Davies. Each Beatle would have his own house in a different part of the island, and there would be a central compound where they would work, play and record.

Lennon had previously bought an island off the Irish coast with the same idea in mind. There was also talk of buying an entire village in England. None of these plans came to anything, although the British Chancellor, James Callaghan, intervened personally to lift currency-control restrictions that threatened the Greek purchase.

That such schemes were ever seriously mooted, never mind pursued, speaks to the extraordinary intensity of the bonds and loyalties forged between the four Beatles in the tumultuous decade since the teenage John and Paul had first met at a church fête in suburban Liverpool. ‘We talk in code to each other,’ Lennon said. ‘I have to see the others to see myself.’ Even at the end, in September 1969, when acrimony was pulling the band apart, McCartney could say: ‘When we get in a studio, even on the worst day, I’m still playing bass, Ringo’s still drumming, and we’re still there.’

In John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, Ian Leslie sets out to isolate and examine the most significant friendship and creative partnership among the four, that between Lennon and McCartney. The two were ‘walking wounded’ when they met, he writes. ‘Each, in his short life, had experienced jarring, alienating, soul-rending events that left permanent scars.’ McCartney’s mother had died of breast cancer in late 1956; Lennon had been more or less abandoned by his parents and was largely brought up by his aunt. He did grow closer to his mother, Julia, as he moved into adolescence, but that closeness was short-lived. She was run down and killed by a car in July 1958.

By then, inspired by Buddy Holly’s example, Lennon and McCartney were already writing songs together. Almost from the beginning they took the remarkable decision to share ownership of whatever they wrote, either together or individually. ‘We decided on that very early on,’ McCartney recalled. ‘It was just for simplicity, really, and so as not to get into that ego thing.’ Words and chords were written in a school exercise book. Each new song had its own page. They gave each one the heading ‘Another Lennon-McCartney original’ in capital letters.

Recognising how extraordinary their friendship was and being able to describe its complexities and chart its development, however, are different things. Leslie has set himself a difficult challenge, then, and one made harder still by his decision not to conduct any new interviews – aside from one with the film director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the man behind the Let It Be / Get Back footage. He typically relies instead on old interviews and other secondary sources, and on mining the songs themselves – which he describes as ‘the richest primary source of all’ – for insight.

John & Paul is structured as a conventional narrative of the Beatles’ rise and the decade from their demise to the death of John Lennon in 1980. Most, if not all, of this material will surely be familiar to anyone interested in the band’s career. Each of the book’s 43 short chapters shares its title with a song, and the narrative is interspersed with analysis of individual compositions, sometimes using them as roadmarkers in Lennon and McCartney’s lives, sometimes digging more deeply into their meanings.

The very best criticism adds new lustre to the art it addresses through the quality of its attention. At its best, the quality of Leslie’s attention, and of his writing, is very high indeed. The profound level of thought, feeling and understanding he brings to some of the songs here is exhilarating. He captures beautifully the dissonantly nostalgic yearning of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, for example, writing that it offers ‘a place that can be glimpsed through the undergrowth, sensed dimly beneath layers of memory but never recaptured: a smudged and faded print of happiness, rather than the thing itself’.

But the book’s premise requires him to find things to say about the state of John and Paul’s friendship, which too often pushes him towards a kind of speculative psychology that isn’t readily supported by the sources. Early on, for example, discussing the brief period in 1961, after the Beatles’ first spell in Hamburg, when Paul got a full-time factory job, Leslie writes that ‘Paul used his job as capital in an unspoken negotiation with John over status… If John wanted Paul to commit to the band, then he would have to commit to Paul.’ But on the next page we learn that the situation was resolved by a phone call from John. ‘Either fucking turn up today’, he told Paul, ‘or you’re not in the band anymore.’ Which doesn’t sound to me much like any kind of negotiation, never mind commitment.

While the varying dynamics of their working relationship are well laid out here, reading biography into any art is a perilous business, and hardly more so when that art is the popular song. The Beatles’ songs are rarely confessional in nature, and Leslie often has to work hard to mine meaning from them. He hears ‘a plaintive quality to John’s vocal that evokes a boy’s need for his mother’s touch’ in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, for example; and, similarly, ‘a trace of desperation in the singer’s plea for his lover to be here, beside him, everywhere (the way a mother is for a small child)’ in ‘Here, There and Everywhere’.

This approach reached its nadir for me in his discussion of ‘In My Life’, in which, Leslie writes, ‘John told Paul just how much their shared history, and shared present, meant to him’ – a reading that he then chides McCartney for not noticing. Too much of the book, in this way, reads as less an account of Lennon and McCartney’s friendship than an imaginative projection of it. I am baffled by Leslie’s decision to impose on himself a structural and analytical framework that is so difficult to sustain and which also offers him such limited opportunity to exercise his formidable exegetical gifts.

Ironically, perhaps, the post-Beatles section of John & Paul is arguably its most successful. It explores the very public acrimony between John and Paul in the early 1970s and the much more private rapprochement that quickly followed, and that extended until Lennon’s death in December 1980. Here, where Leslie has clearly demarcated material to work with – the songs each explicitly wrote about the other and real-time reflections on the state of their relationship – the writing is both psychologically perceptive and often very moving.

The book closes with a brief reflection on old ideals of friendship – Leslie cites Plato and Montaigne – that can plumb the greatest depths of emotional and psychological intimacy. It hints at the more subtle and profound work this might have been. In the end, the mysteries of John and Paul’s connectedness, for which love is surely too small a word, like the mysteries of their music – those extraordinary songs spun out of ear and instinct, imagination and daring – remain unreachable, like an enchanted island, or a dream.