As a child he heard a Knock Knock in his head that threatened his sanity until it was temporarily repressed by a drug. Jasper is the one character for whom the world inside his head is more present to him than the world around him. He “acts a smile.” Appropriately he asks, “‘Do you think reality is just a mirror for something else?’” He has to tell himself to say “Thank you.” He “guesses it’s his turn to speak.” He cannot tell whether Dean is being ironic. He suffers from “emotional dyslexia” and is unable to process emotion of any kind. From the start he seems to act a part rather than live it. Is Mitchell warning us that a purely realist approach is bound to fail? Avenues are everywhere.” Faced with the paradox of writing about music, Mitchell has compared his task to “dancing about architecture,” a quote attributed to Charlie Mingus in the novel. Levon is discreetly gay.Īnd why is the band called Utopia Avenue? It originates in a dream Jasper had. Griff, the jazz drummer and least fully fleshed out character, gets into a car accident that kills his brother. In the first half of the novel Elf, a keyboard player with folk origins, lives with a boyfriend who betrays her in more ways than one, before discovering that she prefers a female lover. Jasper, the virtuoso lead guitarist, spent two years in a clinic suffering from “severe aural schizophrenia,” which threatens to overwhelm him after joining the band. Dean, the bass guitarist, was raised by an abusive, alcoholic father his promiscuity leads to some serious consequences. The group, partially based on Fairport Convention, brings out two albums in 1967-1968 and one (thought lost in a fire) posthumously in 2019.Įach of the musicians is given an interesting back story. It covers two years–19 during which Mitchell’s fictitious band of four British pop musicians rises to fame and vanishes at the height of its success. So what kind of novel is it? Long–just short of 600 pages, but highly readable. This might serve as a warning not to treat Utopia Avenue as mainly realist with a small dose of fantasy largely confined to a later section of the novel, which is what most reviews have done.

As readers we frequently wonder which world we are inhabiting, a reaction fostered by Mitchell. Utopia Avenue is widely described as a realist novel. At the same time a number of reviewers have expressed reservations about his penchant for the supernatural and ask whether he has succumbed to a boyish fascination with benevolent and malevolent spirits at war with one another fighting with psychic weapons. He’s been called “clearly, a genius” ( New York Times Book Review), “a literary magician” ( Esquire), and “the most multi-talented. His large fan base has waited excitedly for his eighth novel, Utopia Avenue, just released. It is five years since David Mitchell released his last novel, Slade House (2015).

Utopia avenue by david mitchell