Towards the end of the book Allen Klein, notorious manager of both the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, hands Dean his card but Dean and the band stick with Moonwhale Music. Of course David Bowie is coming up the stairs, and of course he has words of wisdom to impart the same can be said, in this novel, for Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen and Jerry Garcia. Occasionally there are hints of what feels like self-indulgence. And why not? Genres are made to be shattered, and Mitchell has always refused to be confined. So we get the shabby, exciting streets of London’s Soho, the skanky corridors of Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel, the dreamscape of Haight-Ashbury – along with the possibility that souls might be able to migrate between bodies and through time. But the knocking he hears in his head, a premonition of madness, can’t finally be quieted by drugs, and it is this strand of the novel that brings out Mitchell’s gift for blending the real and the surreal. Science and Technical Research and DevelopmentĪnd what about Jasper? He suffers from schizophrenia, or at least so it seems he spent time as a teenager in a Dutch asylum.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.There’s Elf Holloway, singer, guitarist, keyboards, making a name for herself on the folk scene and discovering the different shapes love can take Dean, a bluesy bassist with a tough past who’s getting kicked out of his bedsit as the book begins Jasper, a Clapton-esque guitar god and Griff Griffin, a down-to-earth jazz drummer by way of Yorkshire.

The novel begins in 1967, in the little clubs and hideaways of London’s psychedelic music scene, when a band begins to come together, its unique sound powered by the different disciplines of its members. One thing is for certain: this book is a labour of love, constructed with the fierce attention to detail that distinguishes all of Mitchell’s work. There will be Mitchellians far better equipped than I am for such a game, and in any case, it doesn’t get us any nearer to assessing Utopia Avenue as a novel in its own right. But I’m not going to give in to to this temptation, at least not any more. Here’s Dr Marinus, found in The Thousand Autumns and The Bone Clocks too and Luisa Rey, last seen in Cloud Atlas from 2004. The band’s bassist, Dean Moss, shares a Gravesend childhood with Holly Sykes of The Bone Clocks, Mitchell’s last novel, which appeared in 2014.

Let’s start by noting that the lead guitarist in the eponymous band of this capacious new book is one Jasper de Zoet it doesn’t take a horologist to discern the link to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, published in 2010. These web pages are a delightfully spoddy assessment of the ways in which Mitchell’s novels – he has called the whole project his “über-novel” – can be linked one to another. The temptation, in reviewing a new novel by David Mitchell, is to approach the process along the lines of the “David Mitchell Universe Wikia”.

Kildare and utopia avenue