'Utopia' means 'no place'. An avenue is a place. So is music. When we're playing well, I'm here, but elsewhere, too. That's the paradox. Utopia is unattainable. Avenues are everywhere.
I read the majority of David Mitchell's books before I started compiling reviews on Goodreads, and in my memory, they were all four or five star reads; Black Swan Green and Cloud Atlas, in particular, remain in my memory as some of my all time favourite reads. So it is with a heavy sigh of disappointment that I sit down to write yet another three star review, acknowledging that if the rating seems harsh to a reader who loved Utopia Avenue, it may just be that I have been led to expect something more original and engaging from this author. (Note: I received an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The Kinks' “Waterloo Sunset” comes on the radio. Elf looks out at Denmark Street. Hundreds of people pass by. Reality erases itself as it rerecords itself, Elf thinks. Time is the Great Forgetter. She gets her notebook from her handbag and writes, Memories are unreliable...Art is memory made public. Time wins in the long run. Books turn to dust, negatives decay, records get worn out, civilisations burn. But as long as the art endures, a song or a view or a thought or a feeling someone once thought worth keeping is saved and stays shareable. Others can say, “I feel that too.”Covering a short time over 1967 and 1968, Utopia Avenue recounts the early days of a famed rock/folk/blues band of that name in swinging London. Filled with real life people from the artistic scene and brimming with period detail, Mitchell nails the historical novel angle; and by creating four distinct and relatable characters to people his imagined band, Mitchell sets up an interesting scaffold upon which to hang conversations about art and immortality and how to live a life. Somehow, though, this potential didn't pay off for me – interesting things happen in the personal lives of the characters, and I liked seeing how they turned those experiences into art; I was also interested enough in seeing how the music industry works and how long and hard artists need to pay their dues to become an overnight success (yet, is there anything new in this?); but between an overabundance of real life people flitting in and out and an ultimately shoe-horned tie-in to Mitchell's uberverse (which started out fascinating and eventually disappointed me), this didn't, in the end, really feel like a book about the core characters so much as a book about the times they were moving through (And is there anything new to say about the swinging Sixties London scene? At any rate, there's nothing new here.).
To briefly (and nonspoilery) address the uberverse: You'll see some familiar characters' names here (from Marinus and Esther to the band's guitarist discovering and being inspired by one of the few extant recordings of The Cloud Atlas Sextet, composed by Robert Frobisher), but this guitarist, Jasper de Zoet, is, obviously, the most direct reference; and it starts so good. In flashback scenes to Jasper's youth, we see him confronting an experience that might be supernatural or might be mental illness, and these scenes have a real Stephen King vibe; neither the character or the reader really knows what's going on or if the danger is real or hallucinatory. We eventually learn that this experience places Jasper as a hinge between the Horologists (last seen fighting their war with the Anchorites of the Dusk Chapel of the Blind Cathar of the Thomasite Monastery of Sidelhorn Pass in The Bone Clocks) and the necromancer Abbot Enomoto (last seen in the eighteenth century at the Mount Shiranui monastery in Japan's remote Kirishima Mountains, in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet),and what started so spooky eventually felt kind of lame and deliberate. (And I see that there are some reviewers who say they've read Utopia Avenue as their first David Mitchell, which is a total shame; I loved The Thousand Autumns and its mindblowing climax is given away here in a few explanatory lines.)
Line-by-line, there was much interesting writing. I liked when a character observed (in reference to a man blind to his wife's illicit affair), “An ounce of perception, a pound of obscure.” Or when Jasper and his photographer girlfriend are developing some photos:
As they watch, a ghost of Elf emerges on the paper, in a state of rapt concentration at Pavel's Steinway. Mecca has the same expression now. Jasper remarks, “It's like a lake giving up its dead.”But more than a few times, Mitchell put in some weirdly clunker lines that made me wonder if they were meant to be ironic, as when it is noted, “The silence in the studio was silent.” Or this spat between Elf and her boyfriend:
“The past, giving up a moment.”
Bruce sighed like a patient grown-up. “Why do you do this?”If this was my first time with Mitchell, I might have thought him a bit amateurish, which he isn't – which then makes me wonder if those unartful lines were deliberate – but if so, why? As for the real life characters – they were hit and miss for me. I didn't recognise the puppyish energy given to the still unknown David Bowie, but I did like Rogers Waters being descibed as having “a smile that is both cloak and dagger”; I thought it was too forced to have Elf discuss sexism in the music industry with Janis Joplin during a very brief tête-à-tête, but I did like having David Crosby explain how it was commercialism that killed the Summer of Love. I thought it was sensitively explored how Jasper seems to be on the autism spectrum (and constantly needs to use contextual clues to determine the intent of other speakers: Irony? Humour? Sarcasm?), but I didn't know how authentic it felt to have him comparing psychoses with a just met Brian Jones or having Jasper bumping into John Lennon under a banquet table at a garden party as they both look for their “fookin' minds”. Protest rallies and police riots; free love and expensive consequences; gay rights and the patriarchy; Ho Chi Min and pirate radio; sex, drugs, and long-haired rock and roll – it's all in here and it all seems to suffocate the narrative.
Elf folded her arms like a wronged woman. “Do what?”
“Music is vibrations in the air, only. Why do these vibrations create physical responses? It's a mystery to me.”So, I'll end on that quote because it kind of says what my problem is with Utopia Avenue: I don't think it really works, and especially when compared with the Mitchell books that worked so well for me, this one doesn't feel like art.
“How music works – the theory, the practise – is learnable. Why it works, God only knows. Maybe not even God.”
“So, photography is the same. Art is paradox. It is no sense but it is sense.”
And although it didn't have a home in my Goodreads review, I also want to note my bemusement at Mitchell writing that one Canadian character grew up with "Jokes about Newfies and Nova Scotians". Sure, there was a time when Newfie jokes were as common as snow at Christmas here in Canada (now, apparently, verboten), but although my Dad was born in Nova Scotia and he and my Mum retired back down there, and although I have lived in four provinces from east to west across this country, and visited most of the rest, I have never heard one joke about people from Nova Scotia. Not that the Bluenosers haven't earned some ribbing, as much as any Newfie ever did.
