7/9/2023 0 Comments Review utopia avenue![]() ![]() Taken individually, many of the set-pieces (and the novel mostly comprises them) seem like the old David Mitchell back telling stories purely for their own exhilarating sake. In New York, the band party at the Chelsea Hotel with Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin in a scene that reminds us how thrilling America must have seemed to post-war Brits. ![]() In London, the gay Levon has a memorable and very long night out with Francis Bacon. He also proves again how good he is at set-pieces. Meeting Dean in LA, Frank Zappa delivers the celebrated line that ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ - but, as it turns out, Mitchell can do that too, infectiously capturing the band’s elation as a song comes together. Both Mitchell and the reader have a lot of fun as well, with walk-on parts from any number of real-life musicians: a pre-fame David Bowie pinning his hopes on a piece of ‘vaudeville psychedelia’ called ‘The Laughing Gnome’ an anxious Brian Jones fearing that he’s being sidelined by his fellow Rolling Stones Marc Bolan behaving like a rock star long before he became one. Meanwhile, the other band members are given their own, more straightforward and ultimately more affecting, adventures. Yet, there’s something slightly dutiful about it too, as if the cosmology that Mitchell has so patiently created is something he (mistakenly) believes his readers would miss if it didn’t underpin everything he writes. ![]() In fact, if you have, Jasper’s story becomes quite intriguing. Jack Grealish and the cult of feminine men Mitchell’s real talent lies in finding wildly entertaining new ways to tell old truths Sure enough, Jasper has a migrated soul from that time buried inside his brain - although to understand that he’s not schizophrenic, or why he has disturbing visions of an 18th-century Japanese abbot, or basically what on earth’s going on, it helps to have read not just The Thousand Autumns and The Bone Clocks, but also a section in Ghostwritten narrated by a Mongolian ‘noncorpum’. Representing themiddle classes are keyboardist Elf Holloway, a female folkie, and guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet, who - as his name and Mitchell’s past form might indicate - is a descendant of the eponymous Dutch shipping clerk in 18th-century Japan from 2010’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. (Mitchell really does plan ahead, it seems.) The rhythm section consists of drummer ‘Griff’ Griffin from Hull and bassist Dean Moss who grew up in Gravesend - where some of the more uncomplicated parts of The Bone Clocks took place in the 1980s and are duly foreshadowed here. The title refers to a rock band assembled in London in 1967 by its manager Levon Frankland, whom we last saw briefly reminiscing about the very same band in a 2015 scene from The Bone Clocks. But happily this is only one element in a book bristling with pleasures from the more traditional side of his palette. True, it does feature one soul that’s migrated enough to require Horologist intervention - and possibly to baffle anyone who hasn’t read his previous fiction. Which is why Utopia Avenue, Mitchell’s first novel since then, comes as a such a relief. (Sample sentence from the showdown: ‘Incorporeally, I pour psychovoltage into a neurobolas and kinetic it at our assailants.’) Worse still, The Bone Clocks was swiftly followed by Slade House in which the Anchorite-Horologist struggle was explained even more painstakingly. The climax came in a full-scale showdown between two kinds of immortal beings: the virtuous Horologists, who achieve immortality by means of their souls entering and reanimating naturally deceased children, and the villainous Anchorites - who achieve it by killing ‘engifted’ children and drinking their souls. In 2014’s The Bone Clocks, for example, Mitchell’s strange fondness for the transmigration of souls as a narrative device was given a backstory of particularly punishing and increasingly silly thoroughness. Occasionally, though, it can feel rather like the type shown by Mrs Doyle in Father Ted, with Mitchell refusing to take no for an answer as he forces more and more would-be treats on his already sated readers. Not only that but, as he’s said, ‘each of my books is one chapter in a sort of sprawling macro-novel’, with many of the same characters and events being either updated or given fuller backstories.Īt its best, this generosity has resulted in some of the most lavishly satisfying fiction of recent times. Ever since Ghostwritten in 1999, he’s specialised in big novels bursting with storytelling in all kinds of genres - most famously Cloud Atlas, where six very different novellas were immaculately intertwined. There aren’t many authors as generous to their readers as David Mitchell. ![]()
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