by Steve Brennan

Created on: March 23, 2009

Some years ago, when asked whom he would like to have the chance to interview, Bob Dylan replied, "I'd like to interview people who died leaving a great unsolved mess behind, who left people for nothing to do for ages but speculate". Which is how, it was presumed, Dylan himself would leave the tapestry of his life when he finally shuffled off this mortal coil, leaving nothing behind except the labyrinthine constructions contained in his incomparable songbook. He has, it is worth remembering, performed quite a balancing act in our celebrity-obsessed age. His fame is immense, mythical, and yet he remains tantalisingly unknown. If Brad Pitt, Britney Spears or J-Lo dye their hair the whole world knows about it within 10 minutes.

Dylan has held the media firmly at arms length, and paradoxically, he is one of the world's more publicly accessible performers, playing an average of 100 plus gigs per year. His interviews are rare and unrevealing, he rarely says more than "fangyoo" on stage, and he has never co-operated with an official biographer. The very notion that Dylan might one day sit down and write his memoirs was generally held by most Bobfans to be pure nonsense.

But here we have the first in a projected three volumes, and a handsome read it is. When the news that Dylan was to pen his memoirs broke, there were some understandable murmurs of apprehension, fanned by the delay of the release date. His previous published work, 1969's Tarantula, can be politely described as unique, and impolitely described as unreadably pretentious. Written in the stream of consciousness style more commonly found on the inside sleeves of albums like Highway 61 Revisited, it left the world scratching its collective head and dropping more acid in an attempt to find method in his madness. Sadly, it wasn't to be, as history has not looked favourably on Tarantula, and Dylan himself has dismissed it as a mistake.

Chronicles is a different kettle of fish. It is a surprisingly open, warm and descriptive book, peppered with the kinds of turns of phrase that you'll read twice to appreciate the craftsmanship. It confounded and delighted those who had suspected Dylan would either turn in an incomprehensible mess, or a deathly dull privacy-guarding career rundown. It is also not strictly an autobiography, for although it takes us inside selected periods of Dylan's life, it does so non-chronologically and concentrates on just five separate time periods, two of which detail the genesis of the albums

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