Henk's Reviews > Utopia Avenue

Great to hear that Mitchell confirms this is optioned for a miniseries adaptation! https://youtu.be/_dXIL393EPQ

Despite the for me unappealing topic a surprising heart wrenching book, elevated by its connections to the Mitchellverse and the normal wit and literary craftsmanship on a sentence level of the author
Art is memory made public. Time wins in the long run. Books turn to dust, negatives decay, records get worn out, civilizations burn. But as long as the art endures, a song or a view or a thought or a feeling someone once thought worth keeping is saved and stays shareable. Others can say, “I feel that too.”

Overall
Art is memory made public.

I was a bit conflicted on rating Utopia Avenue; partly this is due to my lack of musical interest and investment in the sixties that form the decor of this novel, which chronicles the rise of a fictitious band to stardom. Also I feel part of this novel's eligibility to the reader is dependent on having read (and enjoyed) The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Bone Clocks. And there are some idiosyncratic choices, like would a manager from the 60’s say a hipster term as “I’m curating a band”, who names a character Heinz Formaggio or Gunther Marx, and would a supposedly Dutch character like Jasper truly not know how to spell Bitterballen?

Still David Mitchell his writing is a warm bath, I picked this book up thinking I needed something I was sure to find enjoyable, and the first two chapters full of the serendipitous formation of the titular band did not disappoint, as can be said for the novel as a whole.
So I am rounding up the 4,5 stars, also not to be the following kind of reviewer: The kind of critic who’d look at a Michelangelo and complain the marble’s too pale and the dick’s too small.

Structure and characters
Have I strayed into a French novel, wonders Levon, where characters talk about art for page after page?

The structure of the novel follows the creative osmosis leading to songs on the LP's of the titular band. The perspective changes based on the writer of each track, and we get to understand how their circumstances impacted the character in coming up with their song.

Dean is one of the writers and singers coming back most, initially he seems to be rather thinly characterized by his usage of "yer". He is working class and comes from the same town that the main character of the Bone Clocks come from.

Elf Holloway is the folk only female part of the band. She struggles with relationships and patriarchy (Go castrate yourself with a rusty spoon, you crusty pervert were the words that sprang to mind), comes from a loving and upper class banker family, and explains The Odyssey to Dean somewhere. Elf is warm and loving and quite grounded, and at parties says things like I write songs to discover what I want to say.

Jasper de Zoet, distant relative to the main character of the Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a guitarist who has a history with mental institutions. An emotionally ignored scion of a wealthy family he has a psychosis masquerading as a malign entity in his head (or is it the other way around?)
I liked his segments most, his wit and sharpness with words are unparalleled, maybe partly due to his "emotional dyslexia". He says things like the following, in which I think I recognize a bit of the way of phrasing of Mitchell in interviews himself:
The present is a curtain. Those who do see - via luck or prescience- change what is there by seeing. That’s why it’s unknowable. Fundamentally. Intrinsically. I like adverbs.
Or wisdoms like:
Less than eight is haste. More than eight procrastination. Eight days is enough for the world to shuffle the deck and deal you another hand.

Maybe people are a bit too witty and wordy, including a lot of the famous cameos embedded in the novel. But I have a weakness to aphorisms like:
A person is a thing that leaves.
Suffering is the promise that life always keeps.
True love is the act of trying to love. Effortless love is as dubious as effortless gardening.
Marriage is an anchor, lads. Stops you drifting onto the rocks, but stops you voyaging as well.
Grief is the bill of love, fallen due.
Disaster is rebirth, seen from the front. Rebirth is disaster, seen from behind.

There are also side characters like Hull raised drummer Griff and manager Levon Frankland who both have a chapter from their perspective. Mitchell manages to make these side characters, and Bruce, an ex to Elf, very much alive.

Dean in the end turns out however to be the most interesting character, despite I not clicking that much with his narrative voice. He is the vehicle of most rockstar excesses, he has tension between what he says he aspires to from an ethical point of view and his real acts, he seems changed by his overnight success. An ex somewhere in the book says the following to him and is spot on in characterizing him, cause indeed I as reader still rooted for him and found him the most fleshed out and human of the band:
I’d like to say “I wish you the best”, but I don’t want my last words to you to be a lie. So... I hope you’ll find a better version of yourself than the one you are now.

Into the Mitchellverse
Do you think reality is just a mirror for something else?

While reading I loved all “Mitchelverse” references to Cloud Atlas (with Jasper listening to the Sextet), The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (ancestor to one of the band members), Ghostwritten(with Bat Segundo and the Mongolian), The Bone Clocks (Gravesend and Aphra Booth). These “cameos” in a way are even more satisfying then the 60’s music world ones, of which I have little knowledge.
Marinus! Luisa Rey! Crispin Hershey! Aphra Booth! Even a N9D reference if brief. It is impressive how Mitchell seemingly effortlessly ties his whole body of work together in a parsimonious manner.

It did however in the back of my mind also made me also feel a bit like I was reading a form of high quality fanfiction; like I was browsing the Star Wars wiki’s that have backstories for every little side character that appears once or twice in the canon movies.

Still there is a lot to enjoy, as in the Bone Clocks I loved the Horologist sections (The ethics of what we do are grey, I admit. But if ethics aren’t grey they aren’t ethics) most.
The setting of the novel in the sixties, with full blown psychedelic and reincarnation being en vogue, even makes an alternative interpretation plausible.
And the snarkiness in this section is just so enjoyable and takes me back to the pyrotechnics of dialogue in Ghostwritten:
So you’ve spent the last day rummaging in my memory, uninvited?
Do you ask a book for permission before you read it?
&
Should I call you by another name?
Would you care by what name a dog knows you?

The stuff of live chronicled
He feels what you feel when you’ve lost something, but before you worked out what it is.

This is not an high octane novel, if for one of the first times it is a reasonably straightforward linear narrative. It is almost a slice of life in a sense, it would be such a good miniseries I feel.
But the way how Mitchell makes you care and feel grief for a hardly mentioned character dying halfway is both testament to impressive storytelling and the conjuring of thumanity of fictional characters that kept me hooked on reading onwards.

And I did not saw that ending coming, it is almost emotional sabotage in a way, but also put the whole novel for me in a new perspective and emotional light. Something I only frequent remember in the writing of Kazuo Ishiguro, in for instance An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day, another one of my favourite authors.
So he Mitchell does it again and I look forward to future forays into the Mitchellverse!