Mitchell has invented a band, the Utopia Avenue of the book’s title, and inserted them into the underground London and elsewhere of, roughly, 1967–9. Is he really the writer to revivify that hoary old carcass? (The song isn’t named, but it’s Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Atlantic City’.) Popular music has always been deeply woven into Mitchell’s work, and it can express ideas – here eternal recurrence, a key Mitchell theme – with a candour and clarity novels can only aspire to.īut a whole novel about about the music scene in the 60s, that most picked-over, mythologised and clichéd of decades, would seem to be a major gamble for an author whose interests – for all his abundant gifts for story-telling, character and description – have generally tended away from mainstream subjects and towards the oblique and metaphysical. In ‘The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish’, one of the stories that make up Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell’s best-known work, the eponymous narrator is in a taxi when he hears a song on the radio “about how everything that dies some day comes back”.
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