The book has every chance to appeal to readers who were cool about Mitchell's work: there are no fantastic miracles and wizards saving heroes at the most difficult moment. "Utopia Avenue" is the name of a rock band that gathered from the lonely and talented musicians in the 1960s. And although this book contains references to Mitchell's previous novels - "The Cloud Atlas", "Bone Clock", "The Hungry House" - it can be said that it differs significantly from the previous works of the author.
"Utopia Avenue" is a novel about a rock band of the 1960s, at every point of which you want to stay longer From the author of "Cloud Atlas" - science fiction writer David Mitchell
All the novels of the Englishman David Mitchell are tailored according to a similar scheme - as a heap of the most inconceivable events and adventures, which sooner or later become so confused that only transcendental intervention can bring the heroes (and at the same time their creator) out of the dead end. It is at this difficult moment that representatives of the mysterious races invented by Mitchell, who have been invisibly living among us since ancient times, inevitable, like gods out of the car, emerge from the wings - chorologists (benevolent to man) and anchorites (hostile to him, and indeed extremely unsympathetic). They bow, blow kisses to the crowd of fans, quickly solve all the problems and give the story a new impetus - enough to safely come to the next impasse.
Depending on whether you love Mitchell or not, you will wait for the appearance of chorologists and anchorites with more or less impatience, and evaluate everything that happens in the novel primarily from the point of view of twisting: the tighter the spring is cocked, the closer the desired mystical twist.
The new novel of the writer "Utopia Avenue" is arranged in a fundamentally different way - and this, of course, is good news for those who are indifferent to David Mitchell (or love him for anything but magic), and bad for his devoted fans. There will be no fantastic adventures, no sudden plot twists, not even anchorites - only chorologists, and even they will appear on the stage very briefly and as if reluctantly: by and large, everything could have been perfectly resolved without their participation. But what is in abundance in "Utopia Avenue" is the usual, in detail recreated human life, and most importantly, the author's very touching and infectious love for the chosen subject - rock music and its golden age, the 1960s of the twentieth century.
Handsome bass player Dean Moss, who comes from a working-class family, was beaten by his father as a child, and his mother died early from cancer. Guitar virtuoso Jasper De Zoot, the illegitimate son of a Dutch millionaire, spent two years in an asylum for the insane - he hears a strange knocking in his head and is convinced that this is not a hallucination, but an evil settler trying to subjugate his mind and take over his body. The folk singer and pianist Elf Halloway, a girl from a prosperous bourgeois family, has just been cynically dumped by a guy. And the gloomy and silent drummer Griff Griffin, a Yorkshireman with a viscous northern accent, was left without work, because the group in which he performed broke up literally in the midst of the concert. Each of them is infinitely lonely, dizzyingly talented, but at the same time naggingly vulnerable - and therefore organizational talent, an iron grip and fervent faith in the success of Levon Frankland, the Canadian manager, are needed in order to unite these four poor fellows into an alchemically welded rock group. obviously not reducible to the sum of its components.
This group gets the name "Utopia Avenue", and it is its history - from birth in a tiny London club to a triumphant performance at a large American rock festival - is the backbone of the novel. Two crazy years filled with the search for your own style, shameful failures, tiny at first steps to success, breakthroughs, drugs, free sex (and its consequences), interviews, parties, personal dramas, mutual grudges and mutual support - all this with David Mitchell will fit into nearly seven hundred pages of viscous, oversaturated with details, ragged and polyphonic text.
Jasper, Dean, Elf, Griff and Levon will write new songs, lose loved ones, perform in crappy clubs and then in better clubs, go on tour, get in trouble and hang out with all the main stars of the 1960s from David Bowie to Frank Zappa. and from John Lennon to Francis Bacon. At this time, the reader can sit back and enjoy a sightseeing tour of all the key sights of the great era, captured not directly, as in Antonioni's film "Magnification", but from a comfortable distance, providing both a tenacious clarity of sight and nostalgic lyricism.
Usually, this kind of amorphous and almost plotless excursion texts have the property of getting tired rather quickly: it is generally not easy to follow the stochastic movements of the characters that are not subject to any compositional logic and, as it seems, do not lead to any climax. However, this cannot be said about "Utopia Avenue" - rather, on the contrary, at almost every point in the novel you want to stay longer, stop, look around. Mitchell seems to deliberately leave a lot of seductively ajar doors in the text, outlines dozens of barely noticeable paths, introduces, without exaggeration, hundreds of characters that I would like to get to know better, hints at alternative possibilities for the development of certain collisions - and immediately discards them in favor of more realistic ... Deliberately blurring the line between reality and fantasy, mixing historical characters with fictional ones (sometimes you need a serious effort to distinguish the former from the latter), Mitchell actually creates - or, rather, reconstructs - a huge, spacious and dense world, extremely convincing and animated by a colossal author's love, interest and deep understanding of his inner laws.
Of course, Utopia Avenue belongs to the same trademark Mitchell universe - there are many direct and indirect indications of this. Geographical names, heroes of the third and fourth plan, plot clues - all this allows the writer to unmistakably connect the new novel of the writer with the "Cloud Atlas", "Bone Clock", "The Hungry House". It is not hard to guess that the red-haired guitarist Jasper De Zoot came to Utopia Avenue straight from A Thousand Autumn by Jacob de Zoot, and as soon as a man named Marinus appears on the pages of the novel for the first time, the experienced reader Mitchell will immediately disappear all fears: in any in his book, where there is at least one character with that name, some form of a happy ending is inevitable.
However - and it is important to emphasize this difference - despite all the features that make it akin to other books by the author, "Utopia Avenue" stands apart in the work of David Mitchell. Much less polished, intricate and captivating than the previous works of the author, at the same time it gives the impression of much greater sincerity, emotional depth and literary significance.
This article was sponsored by Robert Charvet.
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