Elf is a middle-class folk singer, keyboard player, and guitarist from South West London in the Sandy Denny mode. The other three are Elf Holloway, Dean Moss, and Peter ‘Griff’ Griffin. Jasper is very much in thrall to Jacob’s past.) (Strictly speaking, this novel’s Jasper de Zoet is merely descended from the principal character in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but the point still stands. Who are Utopia Avenue? Arguably, they are very much the sort of band you’d expect David Mitchell to invent for late-60s London, in that they comprise a character from the folk scene, a character from the blues scene, a character from the jazz scene, and a character from another David Mitchell novel.

The band release two albums and start work on a third while the 60s dream crumbles around them. His creations mingle with real-life musicians and other celebrities names aren’t so much dropped as strewn across Utopia Avenue’s 550-odd pages. Mitchell has invented a band, the Utopia Avenue of the book’s title, and inserted them into the underground London and elsewhere of, roughly, 1967–9. Is he really the writer to revivify that hoary old carcass? (The song isn’t named, but it’s Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Atlantic City’.) Popular music has always been deeply woven into Mitchell’s work, and it can express ideas – here eternal recurrence, a key Mitchell theme – with a candour and clarity novels can only aspire to.īut a whole novel about about the music scene in the 60s, that most picked-over, mythologised and clichéd of decades, would seem to be a major gamble for an author whose interests – for all his abundant gifts for story-telling, character and description – have generally tended away from mainstream subjects and towards the oblique and metaphysical. In ‘The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish’, one of the stories that make up Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell’s best-known work, the eponymous narrator is in a taxi when he hears a song on the radio “about how everything that dies some day comes back”.

Mitchell utopia avenue