San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
David Mitchell’s latest novel sings like a great album.
Mitchell writes like he’s lived it — as if he’s sat in with the band from its first show to its last.
I tend to think of David Mitchell’s novels as a tapestry, a mosaic or even a Rorschach test — where the reader looks at the work, and the work looks back.
Mitchell’s latest, “Utopia Avenue,” about a fictional band of the same name in late1960s London, is all of these things. It’s reflective, and it dances and trails out bits of dialogue and character development that drift through the air like music, only to be picked up a hundred pages on like the chorus of a song.
In this novel, the Mitchell Rorschach test looks something like a 600page page quilt. Each of the bandmates in Utopia Avenue (Dean Moss, Elf Holloway, Jasper de Zoet and Peter “Griff ” Griffin) appears like a spot of color, fading away at times, ceding the stage to the other and found later along the patchwork.
Mitchell writes like he’s lived it — as if he’s sat in with the band from its first show to its last. As a writer, rather than a musician, I envy him in this journey. Each chapter is named for a song, and each song is like a diary entry in the lives of these characters.
For those who have read and loved Mitchell’s past work, there are many similarities to those earlier novels, whether that is “Cloud Atlas,” adapted into a 2012 movie starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, or “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.” Like those novels, “Utopia Avenue” moves effortlessly back and forth through time and space, creating a conversation all its own, a style that is distinctive to Mitchell but at times reminds me of Michael Chabon’s epic “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” Both novels share so much with the ambition, doubt and selfsacrifice of the artist, as well as the many worlds contained in an artist’s mind.
It is a wonder Mitchell keeps it all together, and though the bandmates certainly struggle with a multitude of tragedies, hiccups and bumps along the way, they each find their own success.
De Zoet sums up Utopia Avenue’s songs in the best way when he reflects, “‘Where will these songseeds land? It’s the
Parable of the Sower. Often, usually, they’d land on barren soil and not take root. But sometimes, they land in a mind that is ready. Is fertile. What happens then? Feelings and ideas happen. Joy, solace, sympathy. Assurance. Cathartic sorrow. The idea that life could be, should be, better than this. An invitation to slip you into somebody else’s skin for a little while. If a song plants an idea or a feeling in a mind, it has already changed the world.’ ”
One could say the same thing about Mitchell and his novel.
Urban Waite is the author of four novels. He lives in Seattle.