utopia avenue

I'm a fan of David Mitchell and his surrealistic, fantastical worlds--which in some ways, all seem to be related to one another--that flow beneath our own world, occasionally rising to the surface, to turn and twist into our reality. Cloud Atlas is what turned me, and probably many others, on to Mitchell's writing. Cloud Atlas is a series of stories strung out on a very long timeline, but nevertheless are woven together. In Cloud Atlas, we see inklings of how not just these stories, but perhaps all stories are connected, often by much less than seven degrees of separation.*

Utopia Avenue takes its title from a fictional 1960s psychedelic rock band from England, that makes a small splash in the rock world of the time, releasing just two albums, and rubbing elbows with a whole cast of rock legends, who are written in as supporting characters, that interact with, and in some cases support and advise, members of the band and their manager, during their short tour of the United States. 

Mitchell has gone out of his way to create a rock band and a manager that defies the typical rock genre novel; all of the band members seem to get a long, and their manager isn't trying to screw them. Its amazing to a read a story about a rock band without these tropes, if only that in their absence, the writer needs something else to build narrative tension with. Mitchell does that by giving us a story about the very human interactions between the band members, their manager, and those they encounter in their initial struggles, rise to fame, and somewhat abrupt exit from fame and renown, which Mitchell uses cleverly to give us the impression that Utopia Avenue was so short lived, and with just a few hit songs, that they could have actually been there, and we just missed them or perhaps forgotten them in the decades since.

This one was probably more based in reality, with less dips below the surface, than some of Mitchell's other works, which some have compared to Black Swan Green, on the reality to fantastical scale. There were clear references to other stories however, including the connection between the tour de force lead guitarist Jasper de Zoet and his ancestor Jacob de Zoet, from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. But that isn't all, there were a few other things I noticed that I won't get into here.** If you are interested in these connections (which may contain spoilers) the supergeeks over at Wikipedia have a whole list of interconnections to other stories identified. †

This is a review of a book I read earlier in 2024 when I wasn't doing a great job keeping up with the blog. These impressions are from early in January 2025, so its been some time since I've read this book, but I wanted to get it down before I forgot. You can see a list of the books I read, including those from last year that I haven't written about in The Books tab at the top of the page.

* When I originally read Cloud Atlas, I hadn't seen the movie, and looking back at my review of the book, I couldn't imagine how you'd make a movie given the story's complexity, but they pulled it off. The movie, which I eventually saw was pretty good, but not nearly as complex as the book.

** Some of the things I noticed while reading were not conscience connections. Just niggling feelings that there is something there that relates to something else I've read or encountered before. That, in my opinion, can be even more fun; knowing that something you've just read is somehow tied to something else, but without know exactly what it is. It could be another Mitchell book, or perhaps something else...

† The other thing you'll find on the wiki page is a list of Mitchell's short stories, published in various periodicals, and some of them include links. I just read "Muggins Here" on the Guardian website, and that too, has connections to Mitchell's other works. Those connections were put down in this Reddit thread by someone with the handle FormalDinner7.