He proposes instead that nothing could be more natural, or in fact more commendable, than acting on the old and common longing to be heard above the crowd, even- perhaps particularly-at the cost of security and sanity. Mitchell does not castigate or punish Utopia Avenue for their yearning after lights and adulation: he is kinder and more wise. The book is most alive and most compelling when Mitchell slips the surly bonds of the realist premise and lands in his own extraordinary imagined worlds. At times, the frictionless quality of the prose extends to the story itself, so that it is possible to read for several pages at a time without quite feeling that events and characters have landed on the consciousness. It is enlivened by an attentive eye for the particulars. The novel’s prose is for the most part consciously easeful and frictionless: it is a supremely readable novel, if the quality of readability is taken to be one which is difficult to achieve and a relief to encounter. Mitchell is evidently enthralled by both the romance and the practicality of music. The reader is impelled from the first by a kind of rushing, gleeful energy. We thought it would be a mainstream knock-off of This is Memorial Device, but no – the world is big enough for more than one rock-n’roll novel.Mitchell is expert at excavating the seams of loss, ambition and mere chance that lie under the edifice of fame. We haven’t previously read Black Swan Green or the aforementioned Bone Clocks / Slade House double header and now, finally, our appetite whetted, the desire is there to go back and rectify that situation.Īny Cop?: A resounding, surprising success in our book. More than that, it has, as we say, reinvigorated the appeal of Mitchell to us. We enjoyed the time we spent in its company. Stephen King has been recommending the book on Twitter and you can see why – it does all get a bit Stephen King-y in the dash towards the climax.īut the key thing we take away from Utopia Avenue is that we liked it. Another as you’d expect at this point comes in the shape of the way the book loops in with Mitchell’s other books: Cloud Atlas gets a nod, The Thousand Autumns of Jasper de Zoet (obvs) and The Bone Clocks / Slade House. You have solo folksinger Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss, guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet (yes, de Zoet), and drummer Griff Griffin – and we hear from all of them in rotation, bar Griff (who is mostly absent in a “he’s only the drummer and he’s a bit of a lad and probably a bit thick and doesn’t quite warrant an internal life” that makes you want to re-read Toby Litt’s superlative I play the drums in a band called Okay all over again).Įlf is a middle class, home counties sort of woman, bit posh, not quite as beautiful as her sister (in a way that bothers her), given to shacking up with the wrong sort of men (like Aussie plagiarist Bruce), winsome in a sort of ‘Martha’s Harbour’ / All About Eve sort of way Dean is blokey mcbloke (often given to not understanding the literary or cultural references that abound but only for our benefit – he’s canny enough not to broadcast his ignorance), a big old shagger with a penchant for anything in a skirt and an eye for trouble and Jasper – great great grandson of Jacob from the aforementioned book if I remember correctly – is an odd one, largely because he is plagued by a demon he calls Knock-Knock that has taken up residence in his head.Īs you’d expect, there are the typical travails of a band (the early clumsy gigs, the fledgling radio play, the gradual path to stardom) intercut with more cameos than you could shake the proverbial stick at (Bowie, Bryan Jones, Hendrix, Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin – you name em, they’re probably here). The novel concerns (as you probably know by now) a folky-bluesy-rocky-slightly mystical, slightly hippy-dippy band from the tail end of the 60s. Turns out – surprise surprise – we liked Utopia Avenue a whole lot and would now consider ourselves reinvigorated Mitchell-ites. But we weren’t in what you might call a hurry. We knew we had to read it because what self-respecting book site wouldn’t review the latest David Mitchell. We put off reading David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue a little bit because we’d not entirely enjoyed the last David Mitchell book that we read ( The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet).
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