LITERARY FICTION
UTOPIA AVENUE by David Mitchell
(Sceptre £20, 544 pp) WHEN not producing genrebusting novels that push up against the borders of realism and linear time, David Mitchell has a fondness for good old-fashioned nostalgia.
Utopia Avenue is soaked in the stuff: a paean to a vanished music culture that follows a working-class psychedelic fusion band from the spit and sawdust dives of Soho to the intoxicating lights of New York at the dog end of the Sixties.
Their first album bombs but their second soars and, when the bass player winds up in an Italian jail on trumpedup drug charges, a newspaper campaign is launched to get him home.
While Mitchell stuffs this with period detail, his narrative is ploddingly episodic. A large cast that includes John Lennon and David Bowie doesn’t so much add authenticity as compound the nigglingly ersatz quality of the writing.
Mitchell is always a companionable author to spend time with but, as each new novel passes, one can’t help but wonder if his best days are behind him.
MISS BENSON’S BEETLE by Rachel Joyce
(Doubleday £16.99, 400 pp) RACHEL JOYCE has cornered the market in bittersweet novels about elderly eccentrics that both prick and comfort the reader, like a scratchy woollen blanket.
This Fifties-set latest centres on Margery Benson, an unmarried, middleaged domestic science teacher who, after a minor work scandal, embarks on a trip halfway round the world in search of the undiscovered golden beetle that has haunted her since childhood.
Her unlikely assistant is young Enid, a semi-literate, bottle-bleach blonde with a heart as large as the Pacific Ocean but who is carrying far more baggage than is apparent from her suitcases.
As the pair somehow make it to a remote mountainside in New Caledonia, Joyce floods her story with plot, including a murder scandal back home, a psychotic stalker and calamitous weather.
While much of the novel takes place in the Southern Hemisphere, its real subject is the emotional devastation of two World Wars on the English. Like the trip, this is a bumpy ride, but worth it.
ANTKIND by Charlie Kaufman
(4th Estate £18.99, 720 pp) CHARLIE KAUFMAN’S cinematic reputation is assured thanks to the likes of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, but I doubt his debut novel will be remembered so readily.
It’s a 700- page- plus torrent of consciousness from B Rosenberger Rosenberg, a failed film critic and cynic who loathes the films of one Charlie Kaufman. A monstrous cultural misfit, who parades his wokeness at every opportunity, B has recently stumbled upon a lost cinematic masterwork that takes three months to watch, and is convinced writing about it will save his career.
But, when he loses the stills in a fire, he embarks on a Pynchonesque journey to salvage his memory of it, dragging a bewildered reader with him. This precis hardly does justice to a narrative peopled by robot Donald Trumps, comedy double-act Abbott and Costello and a weird ant called Calcium.
Kaufman’s films are masterpieces of narrative construction, but the seemingly limitless horizons of the novel form seem to have gone to his head.