Yeah, I made a typo, but it’s staying.
London, 1967. Bass player Dean Moss is flat-out broke, homeless, and ready to give up on his dreams and head back home to find some dreary menial job for the rest of his life, when he meets a music producer named Levon. Levon hasn’t had much luck so far and this is his last stab at success, so he sets Dean up with folk singer and pianist Elf (short for Elizabeth Frances), drummer Griff and guitarist Jasper. Together they form the band Utopia Avenue, and the novel follows the band from formation to break up as they storm London’s burgeoning psychedelic rock scene of the late sixties.
Many books have been written about music, to varying degrees of success. This one doesn’t really work. Long stretches are devoted to describing how the group interacts on stage, how the music makes people feel, but it never really hits home; music is what you listen to, and it’s hard to convey the emotion that sound brings on paper. The famous faces the band members meet – Bowie, Lennon, Jagger, Rod Steward; there’s an acid trip with The Grateful Dead and a chipper Janis Joplin – all seem weirdly fantastical. There’s even an encounter with Jimmy Savile that clearly has been written with the benefit of hindsight, which seems a little glib.
Likewise, the main characters all seem either shallow or cliche: the tortured genius (Jasper), the rough northerner (Griff. Because it sounds like ‘gruff’, you see), the Cockney heartthrob (Dean) and The Girl (Elf). Dean speaks exclusively in east London slang, which is grating. Elf never really does much except keep the band together (presumably because she is a girl and girls are nurturing, or something). Griff doesn’t get any attention whatsoever, not from the audience and not from the plot. I suppose Jasper’s the most interesting of the bunch: half English, half Dutch, born as the illegitimate son to the scion of the wealthy, influential De Zoet family, he suffers from aural schizophrenia. He’s smart, socially awkward, has his head in the clouds, yet for some reason always seems to descend to earth at the right time. His mental issues are somewhat interesting, but unfortunately the book tackles them in the weirdest, most useless way possible.
If you happen to be someone who has read Mitchell’s other works, you’ll recognise a few names and faces. Jasper’s obsessed with a piece of music called the Cloud Atlas Sextet, and Luisa Rey from the same book makes an appearance; Jasper de Zoet is descended from Jacob de Zoet, he of A Thousand Autumns fame. That, in and of itself, is a little masturbatory but fine, Mitchell, whatever floats your boat. It isn’t until we get to the Horologists. Their insertion into the plot is deeply weird, even if you’ve read The Bone Clocks, and presumably even more befuddling if you haven’t.
I loved Cloud Atlas and I didn’t hate Mitchell’s other books, but he’s never managed to grab me quite like he did the first time. As a novel, Utopia Avenue is fine, I guess, if far too long, but it never really takes off. The band get together, encounter a problem, it goes away. Someone dies, they write a song about it. Someone gets arrested, they write a song about it. This goes on and on and on; not enough happened to hold my attention, and I skipped through the last few chapters. It’s very episodic when I’d expect it to be focused on how the band grows, and it tries to do that, but it never manages to sink its teeth into the interpersonal relationships. It’s not predictable, per se, but it could have been so much more interesting that it is. London in the Swinging Sixties was the place to be; Mitchell makes it sound a lot duller than that.