Review of David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and God by Peter Ormerod – The Making of a Modern Saint | Autobiography books

It has become popular among fans to say that everything went wrong in the world after Bowie’s death in 2016. This also misses the point: rather than being one of the last avatars of the liberal order that collapsed around our ears, Bowie foreshadowed the chaos that took its place.

In his last years, he believed that we had entered a region of chaos and fragmentation. This is what allowed him to be so prescient about the Internet—not its promise, but its threat. There is no plan, no system. There is only disaster and social collapse. Those looking for reassurance should not listen to Bowie (please listen to something, anything, else). His world, from Space Oddity to the backdrop of violence in The Next Day and Blackstar, was always sinking, destroyed or burning: “This ain’t rock ‘n’ roll, this ain’t genocide,” he shouts at the beginning of Diamond Dogs.

Bowie predicted Trump’s world in countless ways. Just listen to “Under God” on 1989’s slandered Tin Machine: “Washington heads in the toilet bowl / Don’t see the racial hatred / Right-wingers in their boiler suits / Picking who to exterminate.” The only detail Bowie got wrong were the boiler suits. We live in a world of pagans, as Bowie alluded to in the title of his breakthrough 2002 album. Bowie didn’t want to live a pagan life.

Whatever meaning God and religion may now have must be measured against this vision of collapse. Perhaps strangely, this is exactly what Bowie saw. Instead of being afraid like a nervous liberal, he saw something else “at the center of everything,” as he repeatedly says on Black Star. This is what he called the “colossal mystery”: the mystery of transience, the mystery of the fact that we die, indeed, as he said in Diamond Dogs, we are dead.

Which brings me to Ormerod’s book. I was wrong about that. Because I loved Bowie with an undying passion for 54 years, I read a lot about him and became angry about his biography. So, when I started reading, everything felt a bit familiar. Ormerod tells the story of Bowie’s life and music through the lens of religion, which is quite fascinating as a main theme, as Bowie was essentially Religious artist.

Beginning with the Anglicanism of St Mary’s Church in Bromley, where Bowie sang in the choir, and continuing his immersion in Tibetan Buddhism in the late 1960s to the occultism of Aleister Crowley, Ormerod deconstructs the religious preoccupations of Bowie’s art in compelling prose. However, the whole thing seems fairly straightforward, and the little stabs at philosophy (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, etc.) feel like a little wiki.

But the book picks up pace when analyzing Bowie’s later works, especially in the chapter on pagans (I read nothing good on this album). This momentum develops into nuanced and detailed discussions of The Next Day and Blackstar, as well as Lazarus, his stunning final experiment with musical theatre. What makes these sections so good is that Ormerod treats Bowie as himself text; As an occasion for close reading, which I think his work deserves, like all good art.

Eventually Ormerod had me sing in the choir with him. The book concludes with a compelling argument that what drives Bowie’s work—and Ormerod is so good at centralizing the concept of motivation—stems from two fundamental sources: life and love. When asked if he had a devotional practice, Bowie replied, “Life. I really love life very much.”

For most of that life, his work was at odds with, even contradicted, a certain inability to love. This is expressed in his music through the incredibly painful longing and experience of isolation which is perhaps the most common theme in his work. Fortunately, he found love in the simplicity of family life and in the vastness of existence that can, if you’re lucky, coincide with old age and death.

As Ormerod points out, there is a kind of insouciance in Bowie’s art – that is, a constant tendency to dismiss any suggestion (not this, not that, not that either). This can be heard throughout his work, but listen to his last song, the final track on Blackstar, “I Can’t Give It All Up,” which is subtly devastating in its merging of deep emotion with rejection: “Saying no but meaning yes / That’s all I ever meant / That’s the message I sent.” This tendency toward negation, toward what Simone Weil called “creation,” places him in the company of medieval Christian mystics such as Margaret Porritt.

There is a strange neo-medieval bent to Bowie’s fanbase. He was not the rock god Christ (although he played that role in the character of Ziggy). But he was something of a saint, and it is irresistibly tempting to see his extraordinary archive in the eastern V&A as a monumental reliquary inspiring that most medieval practice: pilgrimage. Ormerod, like me, is a convert (1996 for him, 1972 for me) and listening to Bowie is like church. Religion doesn’t just influence Bowie’s music. It’s the music. It is its moving essence. It is at the heart of everything.