The novel shows us the fears that motivate artists, the worries they carry with them into fame and riches. The novel’s project, from this perspective, is one of deep realism: it represents the kinds of lives we already know about-those of music stars and celebrities-in greater, richer, more intimate detail. Like the whimsical directors of the British New Wave, Mitchell views the misery and angst of the working class through a posh-adjacent lens, borrowing highly arcane and self-contained forms-the gritty drifter, the hardscrabble northman-for stories of daily life. The novel proceeds through a series of sharp, meticulously detailed vignettes, each presented to us through the grooves of a cut on a record. Mitchell’s details are crisp and specific: Melody Maker, Jimmy Savile, Foyles bookshop, Battersea Power Station, a “roller-towel rattling” in a toilet, “vinegar from the sticky bottle.” The world he narrates is familiar, evocative of films, music documentaries, and liner notes as well as real lives. Snapshots of the lives and habits of British folkies, early glam rockers, psychedelic burnouts, and freaked-out rhinestone cowboys pepper the novel. The answers to the first two are more or less conventional: music can create homes, entire cultural places of belonging. ![]() Like Mitchell’s other novels, Utopia Avenue uses the tension between realism and science fiction to work through a set of social and political questions: What can music do for its listeners? What did music do for youth culture in the 1960s? Is the work artists do political even if it’s popular? Marinus and his ilk are lurking, surfacing briefly to prompt plot turns here and there. This band’s story is embedded in our own-Jim Morrison, John Lennon, Diana Ross & the Supremes, and Sandy Denny all make appearances-but underneath it all, Dr. Mitchell’s latest novel tells the story of the stratospheric rise of a fictional British rock band named Utopia Avenue in 1960s London. Marinus startling, but the longtime Mitchell reader breathes a sigh of relief: here we go, the weirdness has begun. The first-timer finds the appearance of Mitchell’s immortal Dr. ![]() The first-time reader doesn’t know about the temporal pitfalls or the recurring characters. Marinus appears, time and reality stretch and then break, we sense-and sometimes even enter-a gnostic world where good and evil fight in secret, while the realist world moves forward on another plane. These mechanisms usually take the same form across Mitchell’s novels: a mysterious, gruesome figure named Dr. At moments in these books, the fiction of realism collapses, cracks, and we glimpse the horrifying mechanisms that structure the realist universe’s seeming rhythms. Running through them all is a complexly coherent system-the Mitchellverse-that blends crisp realism with dizzying forays into science fiction. There is a coming-of-age novel about a video-game obsessed adolescent in present-day Japan ( Number9Dream), a novel about a Dutch visitor to a port near Nagasaki at the very end of the eighteenth century ( The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), a novel that deals with a widespread environmental collapse and the horror it brings to ill people ( The Bone Clocks). ![]() Each of his books stands alone, as a thoughtful, researched, realistic portrayal of a specific time or place. For every novel David Mitchell writes, two are published: there is the novel read by Mitchell’s fans, and the novel read by first-timers.
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