Utopia Avenue

Last month, I raved about the joy of re-reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. This month, I have the pleasure of catching up on his latest, Utopia Avenue. It’s a sort of benign rewrite of Fleetwood Mac, detailing the rise of a rock/folk group that’s mixed in many ways - gender, musical roots, the styles of the songs they compose. It’s done with huge affection and enthusiasm, and it’s not hard to see the links with other middle-aged writers who dream of being rock stars - Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie. I’ve really enjoyed dreading it, and returned it to the library, but I shan’t rush to re-read it with the same enthusiasm that brought me back to Cloud Atlas.

There’s two strands of self-indulgence which are getting in the way. One is Mitchell’s delight in binding all his work together is one, rich parcel, so that characters from previous novels drift in and out, sometimes barely recognisable, so you can see he’s getting a lot of fun out of this - but is he also baffling new readers? The other downside is his delight in trailing in real people - Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix - for bit parts in this creative roller coaster ride, so the shellshocked reader sits back and asks, really? No, not really, and it would have been so much simpler to have left them out.