There are certain things that, to certain readers, are literary catnip. Two of mine happen to be books set in the 60s and books about the music and popular culture of the 60s. So, as you can imagine, when I saw the synopsis for Utopia Avenue – Mitchell’s first novel since 2015’s Slade House – I was really excited. And thankfully that excitement wasn’t misplaced!

The novel is structured like an album, or a series of them, with the different sections being ‘A’ and ‘B’ sides, and the chapters the individual tracks (taking their titles from the band’s songs). Each chapter is told from the point of view of a particular character, and this determines the tone. For although this is one of Mitchell’s more realist works (not that Utopia Avenue is completely devoid of the fantastical elements that were at the forefront of The Bone Clocks and Slade House, but as they are mainly concentrated in one character, we’ll get to that later) he manages to incorporate a number of different styles (owing to the fact that the band are deliberately curated rather than formed organically).

As the creative powerhouses, Dean, Elf, and Jasper get the lion’s share of the focus – even poor Griff makes the joke about how everyone forgets about the drummer, but even though Griff only gets one chapter to himself, he is never presented as anything less than integral to the band, not only the beat that keeps them in time but the keystone that holds them together). Dean’s chapters are frequently tragi-comic in nature; good-looking and outwardly confident but inwardly insecure – about his class, his abilities to make as it a musician, all stemming from a difficult relationship with a difficult father. Elf’s chapters are an exploration of the plight of the talented female artist having to battle it out to be heard and taken seriously in a male-dominated industry – her middle class background a source of friendly friction between her and Dean – and an exploration of identity and sexuality.

In Jasper’s chapters Mitchell explores the culture of psychedelia and the character of the “mad” genius. He’s also the character Mitchell uses to explore his “extended universe”. An insanely talented guitarist, Jasper is also a direct descendant of Jacob De Zoet, the main character of his 2010 novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, and suffers from a peculiar mental affliction in the form of a knocking sound that has no discernible external source, whom Jasper christens “Knock Knock”. It is strongly implied that this is a consequence of the events of that novel, and not natural in origin, but if you haven’t read Thousand Autumns, or if fantastical elements just aren’t your cup of tea, the context of the setting – the casual drug taking of the 1960s art/music scene and the psychedelia subculture – and the way Mitchell presents it, means that the reader can take it either way: realist or fantastical. So Jasper’s strand obviously reintroduces us to the Horologists, but there are more characters from and references to Mitchell’s previous work – the band’s manager Levon Frankland, for instance, who previously appeared in The Bone Clocks, for instance. (You don’t have to have read any of his other novels for Utopia Avenue to make sense however, though as they’re good books I’d still recommend it.) And speaking of references, one of the elements of Utopia Avenue that has proved slightly contentious are the occasional cameos and name-dropping of famous artists of the period – Bowie and Lennon, for example. Some have found it gauche but I personally enjoyed it. They’re not excessive – just enough to build a fully rounded picture of the era – and worn lightly, and as the author himself said, it would be more conspicuous by their absence.

The narrative avoids the cliché of the “meteoric rise to fame”, showing the nuts and bolts of the band’s creative process, and their struggle as what they’re producing is good but so different people don’t know what to make of it, before they’re then poised on the brink of stardom, but to say what happens next would spoil everything.

To summarise, Utopia Avenue is a brilliantly written music novel that paints a vivid, and slightly trippy, picture of a certain time and place, with compelling characters and a band whose music you’ll wish was real and you could actually look up. If writing about music really is like dancing about architecture – as Mitchell himself quotes in an author essay – then expect to see architects giving descriptions of buildings through the medium of interpretive dance from now on.

Utopia Avenue is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.

Will you be picking up Utopia Avenue? Tell us in the comments below!

Synopsis | Goodreads

Utopia Avenue might be the most improbable British band you’ve never heard of. Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967, folksinger Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss, guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet and jazz drummer Griff Griffin together created a unique sound, with lyrics that captured their turbulent times. The band produced only two albums in two years, yet their legacy lives on.

This is the story of Utopia Avenue’s brief, blazing journey from Soho clubs and draughty ballrooms to the promised land of America, just when the Summer of Love was receding into something much darker – a kaleidoscopic tale of dreams, drugs, love, madness and grief; of stardom’s wobbly ladder and fame’s Faustian pact; and of the collision between idealism and reality as the Sixties drew to a close. Above all, this captivating novel celebrates the power of music to connect across divides, define an era and thrill the soul.

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The Book Cook Look Club is a small Australian based book club combining three much-loved activities: reading, cooking and films. Declan, a member of the club, will be recapping his experience each month right here on The Nerd Daily!

BOOK | One person selects a book for everyone to read over the next month.
COOK | The book selector hosts a dinner party with a themed meal related to the book.
LOOK | We compare the film adaptation to its source material.

If a life amounts to nothing more than one drop in a limitless ocean, then what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

This is the concept that David Mitchell draws out and examines in Cloud Atlas. Each character is the centre of their own story, and yet every other person they meet is living a life just as incredibly detailed and complex as their own. In the book club’s discussion, our focus was not only on the weaving of this metanarrative, but what exactly defines this style of writing.

Entrée

After a month off and a few people having to pull out last-minute, the group felt noticeably smaller tonight. But Cassie’s intricate meal plan for the night did not go unappreciated. With three courses, and Cloud Atlas having six main storylines, the maths worked out to be two storyline references per course.

First up: California sushi rolls and pineapple juice.

This entrée was intended to integrate elements of Luisa Rey’s 1970’s Californian mystery-thriller, and Zachry’s Hawaiian post-apocalyptic story.

Cassie, being an aspiring writer, ranks Cloud Atlas as one of her favourite books of all time, and after some dissection the reasons for this became obvious. The premise is that six different people, each living in different periods of history, are reincarnations of each other.

On the surface, they are as unalike as they could possibly be; the witty English bohemian of the 40’s is a far cry from the Korean slave of the future. And yet, while all six reincarnations are vastly different people, they are bound by one simple, overarching desire—to make a mark on the world.

David Mitchell’s ambition to tackle six stories of completely different genres and his success in weaving them all together are essentially what made this book so memorable for Cassie. As we starting to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, our main course was served.

Main

The Korean fried chicken burgers were a manifestation of Somni’s Korean, dystopian fast food occupation. On the side, Cassie’s serving of snow peas referenced one of Timothy Cavendish’s meals in his modern-day British farce.

The direct links between narratives were established through each character pondering the story of their predecessor—whether through a journal, a manuscript, or a film. They consider the main themes and developments of the story they have just perceived, making the exact same assessments that we as readers just made.

This is postmodernism in its purest form. If you have read the club’s previous discussion of Haruki Murakami, you would know that I’m a sucker for this sort of thing. Anything that experiments with conventional narrative structure and pulls it off in a significant, engaging way is absolutely worth putting time into.

Despite each character having their own individual story, they are bound by a singular human experience. Rebellion, secrets, betrayal, love, greed, joy—to address so many general concepts in any meaningful way would seem nearly impossible. But by justifying and exploring each within different contexts, Mitchell paradoxically suggests that the human experience is both incredibly broad and insignificantly tiny.

And then, up came the topic of the film adaptation, just in time for dessert.

Dessert

Banana pastry, drizzled with Belgian chocolate. These alluded to the 19^th century Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, and the letters of Robert Frobisher during his trip to Belgium.

In 2012, Cloud Atlas was turned into a blockbuster film in 2012, directed by the Wachowskis. It was hugely divisive amongst critics, and for good reason.

As Alec dug into the pastry, he expressed his inability to fully invest in any of the stories in the movie, simply because its constant jumping around never allowed enough time to flesh out a single one. It felt like every second scene was a montage, blending together each of the main characters’ narratives in a way that constantly ruined the pacing.

Despite this, I found that the constant cutting between storylines still achieved what the Wachowskis set out to do: to emphasise the parallels between the main characters and their human experiences. Even the casting of actors in similar roles across stories holds some symbolic meaning, with Hugo Weaving generally being the antagonist and Jim Sturgess playing the revolutionary leader across time.

But then there’s the race problem. Even if there was some intention behind the transracial casting, the yellowface is still incredibly jarring and undoubtedly problematic.

We concluded as a group that Cloud Atlas is a metanarrative intended to be read. The overarching questions of life that are so wonderfully fleshed out in those pages cannot be crammed into a movie without losing some of its original impact. The sheer scale of the metanarrative is impressive on its own; the fact that Mitchell pulled this off in such an insightful, humorous, and suspenseful way makes it even more so.

Metanarratives have formed the backbone of culture throughout history. From the Bible to Homer’s Iliad, these are the stories that address our consciousness, free will, and mortality. Ultimately, it is in its examination of humanity within a postmodern age that Cloud Atlas sets itself apart from its ancestors.

Did you enjoy the novel or the film? Tell us your thoughts on either in the comments below!

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