Mitchell puts an otherworldly spin on the carnival of Sixties rock ’n’ roll
DAVID Mitchell cut an unassuming dash when I interviewed him a decade ago in a Cork eatery ahead of the release of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. We were meeting six years after his third novel Cloud Atlas had, as he put it, “won the lucky lottery ticket” of an endorsement by the Richard & Judy TV book club, putting him into a select sales tier experienced by few novelists.
His point that day was that he wouldn’t be taking it for granted, and life as full-time fiction writer would carry on as normal from his home in Clonakilty. This has included not only another four novels, but short stories, opera librettos and even translations of Japanese works (Mitchell lived in the Far East with his wife before they relocated to West Cork).
The novel feels like the form most loved by Mitchell, the place where his voyaging mind is able to venture untethered while keeping a foot in the everyday. This drawing together of the real and the fanciful has been a hallmark of his best work. Science fiction is a plaything in his hands. Dimensions are leapt through, temporal vortices yawn open in front of characters, and meaningful echoes bounce about through his tales, often in sight of dole queues, kitchen sinks and baked beans.
The world-building that he has busied himself with through his career is now reaching a very interesting stage with Utopia Avenue, his ninth novel. By the time you reach the end of this typically epic saga about a UK rock band in the late Sixties, there is the real sense that Mitchell’s books are all aligning in one common universe and that he may even have been planning these quiet narrative ley lines through his body of work the whole time. Motifs, images and even whole characters recur if you pay attention.
Take Jasper de Zoet, the spacedout lead guitar virtuoso in Utopia Avenue with a surname instantly recognisable to Mitchell fans. Through the sounds in his head and his difficulty interpreting the tones and emotions of others, we see that Jasper is somewhere on the spectrum. The novel charts the personal journeys of all four band members as they ascend the ladder of rock stardom, but it is the inner journey of Jasper where Mitchell’s trans-dimensional tendencies get exercised, and in spectacular fashion too.
Otherwise, much of the world-building has already been done for the Corkman, and what a rich, storied world it is; the sheer mythology of popular culture and the revolutionary backdrop that was broiling away behind it.
Mitchell takes the trope-heavy ascent of bands from those days and puts a slight spin on things where needed. The quartet is what today you might call ‘manufactured’, brought together from diverse backgrounds by manager Levon, who bucks the era’s trend for unscrupulous band managers.
Surly drummer Griff comes from the jazz world, keyboardist Elf is a folkster in the Sandy Denny mould, while bassist Dean is the blues-rocker. Jasper appears untethered to any genre, and his mix of brilliance and fugue can’t help but recall the recently departed Peter Green.
There is the gentle thrill of looking over a character’s shoulder as they write songs from experiences. For Elf, family tragedy, a rotten boyfriend, patriarchal abuse and sexual awakening pulse through her chords.
It’s hard to get this demystification of hit song-writing right but Mitchell does a fine job because the integrity of the characters’ goals has been so clearly delineated. The titular band builds from early shambolic performances into a throbbing stage act, and the passages of description of the live music themselves veer from inspired to slightly limp. All around, the lotus-eaters of their odyssey loom in the form of groupies, drug-dealers and crooked bookers. Band members end up in the headlines and the group’s allure ratchets.
Everything happens for a reason, even chance encounters. A merry-goround of icons cross their paths, and often their tenor is struck immaculately. Jasper lights a joint for Syd Barrett and finds black holes looking back. Francis Bacon cocks a Soho eyebrow at Levon, and Leonard Cohen charms Elf at the Chelsea Hotel. Bowie pops up in the London early days like a sprite.
As you’d expect, these slot in best when there isn’t a huge “look who it is” sign over them or a character blurts ‘You’re John Lennon/Frank Zappa, etc’.
This is a 600-page tome of a novel, and it would be impossible to hit every bullseye in that space. What matters is that Mitchell places you so squarely in a lore of music and hedonism that is gone, and gives it breath.
The ache of rock nostalgia is prominent but the thing you really take away from this richly entertaining epic is the immediacy of real life when washed with the extraordinary colours of the time and Mitchell’s trademark otherworldliness. An ambitious thing to attempt, but that is what we’ve come to expect from him.