Book Review - Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

 

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Utopia Avenue cements David Mitchel’s sterling reputation as a master story-teller.
After dabbling in the occult (The Bone Clocks), paying a tribute to John Lennon (Number 9 Dream), historical fiction (The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), classical music and SF (Cloud Atlas), the author writes about the psychadelic rock-music genre. Marc Bolan, Al Ginsberg, Steve Winwood, a pre-psychotic Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd, The Beatles make an appearance in the narrative. Here the gorgeous, heterochromic David Robert Jones, epitomizing Ziggy Stardust waltzes by

a figure striding up, his trench coat flapping like a super-hero’s cape… The figure pushes back his fringe to reveal a thin white face, with one blue eye and one jet-black.
…Jasper mines a shrug. ‘Who are you?’
‘David Bowie, artiste-at-large.’

The Cloud Atlas sextet makes a cameo appearance and fiction segues into reality when the band members discuss the newly released Sergeant Pepper’s

‘I asked,’ said Dean, ‘what yer thought of the album.’
‘Why stick labels on the moon? It’s Art.’

Hendrix exchanging guitar techniques, Keith Moon (the drummer from The Who), the artist Francis Bacon and the syrupy Herman’s Hermits drift in and out of the narrative.
An encounter with a stoned rock-artist/poet.

Another under-table shuffler. Twenty feet away, fifteen, ten, five … The two inspect each other.
‘You are you aren’t you? Asks Jasper.
‘I think so,’ says John Lennon.
‘I have been looking for you since I got here.’
‘Congratulations. I am looking for …’ He needs a prompt.
‘Looking for what, John?’
‘Something I lost,’ says the Beatle.’
‘What have you lost, John?’
‘My fuckin’ mind, pal.’

The following encounter occurs at Leonard Cohen’s marijuana soaked roof-top party.

A woman turns around. She wears a pink boa woven through her hair, the gown of a damsel in distress, enough bracelets and chains to open a stall, and is one of America’s most famous singers.
‘Janis fookin’ Joplin? This time it’s Griff who blurts.

Soon Janis belts out a rock classic accompanied by Jackson Browne.
What seems to be the meteoric (such a cliched term) career of a rock-group, soon acquires ominous undertones. Without adding spoilers, there is a connection to another of the authors books towards the end. It is not (Cloud Atlas) although it deals with trans-generational migration of souls…

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