by David Mitchell
I’ve been an avid David Mitchell reader ever since Ghostwritten. I loved the supernatural elements in his work as long as they were presented as mysteries that obviously contained a secret logic and backstory of their own, albeit one the reader was never privy to. That reticence on the part of the author added depth and power to his stories and the characters who appeared in them. And as Mitchell’s work matured through Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, each book more fully realised than its predecessor, I thought I had found another lifelong favourite contemporary novelist like Iain Banks, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan or Gene Wolfe.
The came the speed bumps. The Bone Clocks was a brilliant page-turner but its revelations caused that ghostly, essential backstory to lose its mystery and power, to the detriment not of the book itself but, alas, all of Mitchell’s previous writing instead. This was followed by the genuinely frightening Slade House, which in spite of its success within the limited parameters set by genre-fiction icons like Clive Barker and Stephen King, hammered the last coffin-nails into the backstory and, moreover, utterly failed to satisfy as a David Mitchell novel.
And then this. It’s been out for almost three years now, so I shan’t bother to tell you much about it. It’s set in the Sixties. London. Pop music business. The story follows a band that almost makes it, but fails to crack America. There are lots of fictitious cameos from famous real stars, but – as someone said on goodreads.com – they’re no more lifelike than their waxworks at Madame Tussauds. One exception is the infamous Don Arden, who appears here as some kind of brutal Mephistopheles, an agent of pure evil, with Steve Marriott in his thrall; good call there. Mitchell’s own invented characters are, to be fair, more rounded: but what a dull lot they are, and how tedious they are as a band. The lead guitarist provides the supernatural link with Mitchell’s earlier works, but frankly that’s all a bit tedious, too.
As a rock fan who grew up in the Seventies and who is himself a musician, Utopia Avenue should have been right up my street. And at first, I did quite like it; but that should have been a warning, since one of my favourite authors writing about my favourite subject should have been thoroughly enjoyable to read, not just likeable.
Still, it took some time for the scales to fall. The book is very easy going, written in a rather simplified and deformalized version of Mitchell’s characteristic style that seems to take aim at the young adult market. It moves along at quite a clip. It’s a pleasant enough read, almost too action-packed in places, but when it was all done with, I really had to ask myself why I’d bothered. It is only now, two years after I read it, that I have finally admitted to myself how bad a novel Utopia Avenue really is. Hence this belated review.
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