Review: Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

reviewed by Brian Finney

Utopia Avenue
David Mitchell
Random House, July 14, 2020
$17.28; 592 pp.
ISBN: 978-0812997439

It is five years since David Mitchell released his last novel, Slade House (2015). His large fan base has waited excitedly for his eighth novel, Utopia Avenue, just released. He’s been called “clearly, a genius” (New York Times Book Review), “a literary magician” (Esquire), and “the most multi-talented . . . novelist of his generation” (Atlantic). At the same time a number of reviewers have expressed reservations about his penchant for the supernatural and ask whether he has succumbed to a boyish fascination with benevolent and malevolent spirits at war with one another fighting with psychic weapons.

Utopia Avenue is widely described as a realist novel. As readers we frequently wonder which world we are inhabiting, a reaction fostered by Mitchell. This might serve as a warning not to treat Utopia Avenue as mainly realist with a small dose of fantasy largely confined to a later section of the novel, which is what most reviews have done.

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So what kind of novel is it? Long–just short of 600 pages, but highly readable. It covers two years–1967 and 1968 during which Mitchell’s fictitious band of four British pop musicians rises to fame and vanishes at the height of its success. The group, partially based on Fairport Convention, brings out two albums in 1967-1968 and one (thought lost in a fire) posthumously in 2019.

Each of the musicians is given an interesting back story. Dean, the bass guitarist, was raised by an abusive, alcoholic father; his promiscuity leads to some serious consequences. Jasper, the virtuoso lead guitarist, spent two years in a clinic suffering from “severe aural schizophrenia,” which threatens to overwhelm him after joining the band. In the first half of the novel Elf, a keyboard player with folk origins, lives with a boyfriend who betrays her in more ways than one, before discovering that she prefers a female lover. Griff, the jazz drummer and least fully fleshed out character, gets into a car accident that kills his brother. Levon is discreetly gay.

And why is the band called Utopia Avenue? It originates in a dream Jasper had. As he says, “‘Utopia’ means ‘no place’. An avenue is a place. So is music. . . That’s the paradox. Utopia is unattainable. Avenues are everywhere.” Faced with the paradox of writing about music, Mitchell has compared his task to “dancing about architecture,” a quote attributed to Charlie Mingus in the novel. Is Mitchell warning us that a purely realist approach is bound to fail?

Take Jasper. From the start he seems to act a part rather than live it. He suffers from “emotional dyslexia”  and is unable to process emotion of any kind. He has to tell himself to say “Thank you.” He “guesses it’s his turn to speak.” He cannot tell whether Dean is being ironic. He “acts a smile.” Appropriately he asks, “‘Do you think reality is just a mirror for something else?’”

Jasper is the one character for whom the world inside his head is more present to him than the world around him. As a child he heard a Knock Knock in his head that threatened his sanity until it was temporarily repressed by a drug. As the novel progresses the Knock Knock recurs with increasing frequency. But what is it? As a boy he decided it “is neither a lie nor a ghost nor a psychotic episode but an unknown.” The eruption of the unknown into the known? However while still a boy he learned to communicate with it and learned that it is 693 years old. At the age of 16 Jasper looked into the mirror and saw–not himself–but an Oriental cleric with a shaven head stare out at him. This turns out to be a character in a previous novel.

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There’s no way of avoiding what Mitchell calls his uber-novel. As he put it, “Each of my books is one chapter in a sort of sprawling macronovel. That’s my life’s work.” Since his second novel Mitchell has developed a habit of “re-hiring” characters and re-using locations and incidents from his previous work. In the case of Utopia Avenue his biggest borrowing is from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), a novel set in eighteenth-century Japan. Jasper’s last name is de Zoet, the same as Jacob’s, the protagonist of that novel who is a Dutch trader. Jacob falls for a Japanese midwife who is imprisoned by an abbot (Enomoto) who preserves his immortality by eating the souls of babies. When Enomoto is eventually poisoned, we now learn, his soul transfers itself to Jacob, Jasper’s ancestor and passes down from father to son to become Knock Knock in Jacob’s head.

This is far from the end of this supernatural storyline. But it is enough to indicate how the fantastic emerges in this so-called realist novel. Mitchell retains a healthy skepticism about his resort to the supernatural when he has Marinus, an immortal spirit from his previous novels who fills Jacob in with past material, say, “The chain of events would fill a hefty novel,” referring of course to The Thousand Autumns (almost 500 pages long). He even labels a hospital ward in Utopia Avenue “N9D” as a jocular coded reference to his second novel, number9dream (itself a 1974 John Lennon song that also plays anachronistically at a disco in Black Swan Green).

Metafictional jokes aside, Mitchell does offer some reasons for his numerous references to characters and events in his previous work. Take, for instance Elf’s girlfriend, Luisa Rey, a journalist who was the major character of the third and ninth sections of Cloud Atlas that took place in 1975. In it she proves extraordinarily courageous as an investigative reporter. In Utopia Avenue we meet her in 1967-68 when she is beginning her journalistic career. Mitchell utilizes Luisa’s later spunky personality to show her in this novel risking her life and forced to hide in an upstate cabin from some gangsters she’d exposed. As Mitchell has explained, “Why invent the biography of a new character . . . if I can re-hire someone from my pre-existing dramatis personae . . . who already have fully-formed backstories and opinions?”

However Mitchell’s growing macro-novel raises more important issues. Each new novel sheds light on his previous novels. Individual characters become temporary hosts for human life that refuses to be circumscribed by a single lifetime. Human beings reveal essential characteristics that exceed their particular individuality. Moreover his fictional use of souls conveys Mitchell’s belief that life is more than material existence. He has called himself an ethical Buddhist. So it is no surprise that he undermines physical reality in all his novels. As Elf asks herself near the end of the novel, “Is the soul a real thing?” She adds, “I wondered then as I wonder now.”

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Mitchell’s erosion of the border between the fantastic and material worlds allows him to raise large questions that might not be appropriate in a realist context. Jasper can ask, “Do you think reality is just a mirror for something else?” Francis Bacon, who makes a bit appearance, quotes “Grief is the bill of love, fallen due.” An ex-member of the Byrds remarks, “Fame molds itself onto your face. Then it molds your face.”

Mitchell is aware that, as he says, “fantasy is the easiest genre to do badly.” There are moments in this novel when the fantastic sounds just silly. Take this exchange between Jasper and Marinus when Marinus is explaining the psychomachia in which Jasper finds himself:

……….How are you doing all this?
……….A branch of applied metaphysics called psychosoterica.
……….Jasper considers the word. It sounds like quack science.
……….Our fifth-century mule-driver would not know the words “orbital velocity.” Does his
……….ignorance mean that aeronautics is quack science?
……….No, admits Jasper. Psychosoterica. What is it?
……….The devil’s box of tricks, to some. To others, it’s an arsenal. To us, it’s an evolving
……….discipline.

Although Marinus denies it, he does employ his arsenal of spiritual powers to overcome the murderous plan of Enomoto to end Jasper’s life. The kind of mental weapons used in Mitchell’s later novels differ little from the flame swords found in Game of Thrones or Final Fantasy. Life is reduced to a battle of good and evil. Over-simplification prevails. As the reviewer for the London Independent wrote about The Bone Clocks, “the plunge into the supernatural feels as if your best friend just told you she believes in fairies.”

Mitchell says he read over fifty books by and about musicians of the late 1960s. He is clearly knowledgeable about this period of musical history. And he is obviously having fun bringing actual rock stars into contact with his fictional band members. But it can be just too much. On one page Elf runs into both Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett and Allen Ginsberg. And at a film producer’s party in London, members of the band meet Brian Jones (The Stones), Jimmy Hendrix, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Keith Moon (The Who), not to mention Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. Once again Mitchell resorts to irony to anticipate his readers’ objections by having Dean remark, “There’s too many famous people at this party. It’s bloody ridiculous.” Mitchell also has Jasper run into David Bowie (before he’s become famous) on the stairs when Bowie says, “I was on my way up. Now I’m going down. Is that a metaphor?” Clumsy is what that is.

For the most part Mitchell is still a good novelist whose inventive narrative structures, range of characters, vivid language, and fascination with the connection between material and fantasy worlds make him a writer always worth reading. As a girlfriend says to Jasper when he remarks, “The reality isn’t at all like the fantasy.” “When did that ever matter?”

Brian Finney is a Professor Emeritus at California State University, Long Beach. He is the author of nine books, including a biography of Christopher Isherwood that won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Money Matters, an award-winning debut novel that was published in 2019. Find him at www.bhfinney.com