![]() David Bowie, Nina Simone, Allen Ginsberg, Syd Barrett, the Butterfield Blues band, Diana Ross, Engelbert Humperdinck, Keith Moon, Grace Slick, Michael Caine, George Best, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa and John Lennon all pass through, the effect of which is to encourage page-turning celebrity-sighting, not to substantively advance the novel’s story and ideas.īuilding on its rising profile, which is helped by Dean’s Roman confinement and by songs that begin to chart, Utopia Avenue is invited to play in the United States. Historical figures appear alongside the members of Utopia Avenue constantly. Dean is imprisoned on false drug charges, and the British media play up his predicament. Later, the band has a bad mix-up with corrupt Italian police following a performance in Rome. Bandmates sleep with other people’s spouses and deal with groupie pregnancies Griff is behind the wheel in a car accident that kills his brother and he steps away from the band at a crucial moment in its ascent more established managers tempt the band to drop Levon music journalists flirt and fence with Dean and his mates for inside stories on the promise of good coverage one of Elf’s boyfriends, not a musician, offers uninvited creative advice to the other members another, her ex from a defunct folk duo, returns to her life with perfect dirtbag timing, just as Utopia Avenue is beginning to enjoy success, and casually volunteers to begin sitting in on sessions. The main story focuses on the band’s trajectory from mediocre early work to underground success to broader British attention and, eventually, fame and fortune in the United States. Mitchell provides all of his characters with an affecting back story that informs the aspirations and longings that figure in their musical collaboration, eventually called Utopia Avenue.ĭavid Mitchell's books comprise a sprawling narrative singularity marked by teasing, dark recurrences and transformations. ![]() Levon, the quietly ambitious, gay Canadian impresario, brings together bassist Dean and guitarist Jasper with a female singer and keyboardist named Elf and a remote drummer called Griff to create the band. In the meantime, he blends two more standard kinds of novels: historical fiction and a rock band book. But Mitchell defers the unfolding of an intra-novel, inter-dimensional, trans-temporal war for human souls to the novel’s closing sequence. ![]() This all takes place in the first 15 rollicking pages of a 600-page story, and Mitchell is signaling, by way of the guitarist’s name, that what we’re about to read is linked somehow to his previous writings, including his historical novel about a Dutchman’s experiences in 18th-century Japan, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. “Who is he?” “His name’s Jasper de Zoet.” Levon is a music producer who likes Dean’s music and invites him along to a nightclub to hear a virtuoso guitarist play psychedelic covers of Mississippi blues standards. Amping up the already-high Dickensian mode, Dean flips his last coin to decide what to do next the coin disappears down a gutter, and a mysterious stranger appears. He wields his bass guitar as a final attempt to make it as a musician in late 1960s London. ![]() He is soon bruised, jobless and homeless. A bewhiskered stockbroker type in a bowler hat smirks at the long-haired lout’s misfortune, and is gone.” Dean heads off again, only to be pickpocketed on his way to pay the rent to his merciless landlady before begging in vain for a pay advance from his boss, a miserly Italian restaurant owner. He slips and falls on black ice: “ Bloody London. The novel begins with a young man, Dean, rushing down a busy street. That said, there is another, darker story here that (depending on how you feel about Mitchell’s overall body of work) either threatens or promises to be the primary source of the book’s considerable, if diffusive, energies and ambitions. Its particular areas of interest and treatment-recent North Atlantic history and culture, celebrity and politics, 1960s historical figures and a briefly famous rock band-are related to music-making. Mitchell’s latest, Utopia Avenue, is at first glance a maximally detailed historical novel. ![]()
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