UTOPIA AVENUE

DAVID MITCHELL

Sceptre, 576pp, £20

It soon becomes clear that this is a book of two parts: the first is a straightforward feelgood narrative about an eponymous Sixties rock band, while the second part is more complex in a weird and selfreferencing classic David Mitchell style. Sarah Perry in the Guardian summed it up as arriving ‘both as a distinct book and as a further chapter in the ongoing “metanovel” that constitutes Mitchell’s work to date’.

The first aspect was welcomed by James Walton in the Spectator, who found it ‘bristling with pleasures from the more traditional side of his palette’. Perry loved the time and place: ‘It is London, 1967. Here is Foyles, here is the Pillars of Hercules pub… There is LSD in the clubs and sex to be had in bedsits.’ Alex Preston in the Observer described how the

Jonathan Dee found the selfreferencing ‘empty of meaning or grander purpose’

book is ‘arranged into three separate “albums”, with every “track” written from the perspective of a different member of the band’, each representing a stratum of society, with, as Walton pointed out, the drummer from Hull and bassist from Gravesend, while the middle classes are served by the ‘female folkie’ Elf and ‘guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet’.

Interweaved are real musicians, such as Leonard Cohen and David Bowie, a device which Jonathan Dee in the New Yorker found ‘mortifying’. For Preston, the self-referencing was ‘empty of meaning or grander purpose’, while Mathew Lyons in the Quietus noted that ‘In Utopia Avenue, everything reflects back on itself, even the guitar solos.’ Lyons nevertheless described it as Mitchell’s most heartfelt novel yet: ‘If the book captures the hope of the Sixties… it does so in a way that is neither nostalgic nor sentimental but warmly embodies the message that everything dies… It is how we live that matters.’