Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell Review

Utopia Avenue is David Mitchell’s latest title featuring a put-together band that sails the seas of the music industry of London in ‘67/’68. David is known for his unique novel structures and this one is a simpler setup for the architecture of the novel. It’s divided into album sides for its parts and each chapter is a song title. The POV for each chapter is the character that wrote the song title. This works effectively enough, though it does mean that there are band members that basically get set off to the side.

The three POV’s are Elf, Dean, and Jasper. Each has a story arc under the bigger umbrella arc of the novel itself. Their stories, since they all involve their immediate investment in the band that is Utopia Avenue, hides what is often Mitchell’s ‘weakness’ in his novels. He doesn’t write a whole novel; he writes little stories and strings them together. In “Cloud Atlas” and “The Bone Clocks,” this is intentional and a strength. In a full novel with all characters going in one direction, you can get the feeling a chapter is not fully settled into the rest of the narrative and is coming off as an aside. Fortunately, his writing is of a strength that it usually doesn’t matter as the reader is fully engaged with what is on the page, wherever it’s going.

The voices for each POV are quite strong and I was impressed from the first time Dean did something really stupid, that I had a voice in my head for him that was clear and distinct. Elf, in my head, was a little mush mouth in voice, but as she did stupid things, I was more, “…oh come on, girl…” and not just rolling my eyes as I did with Dean. By the end, I was like, “…see Dean? That’s what you get!” The strongest POV was Jasper de Zoet. Many characters come and go through Mitchell’s books in a creative “Mitchell-verse,” and Jasper is a direct descendant of Jacob de Zoet from Mitchell’s, “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.” Of all the characters, I found him the most engaging and sympathetic, and Jasper actually has all of the few ‘holy shit!’ moments in the book, (which I did tweet as much to Mr. Mitchell who kindly and warmly replied.) I do wish that this book was solely from his POV, even a first-person POV, where his big moments came after the unfurling of his mental state over the course of the whole book. Jasper’s story is let down slightly by a direct hammer of a Deus Ex Machina, but fans will know this is goes straight to the heart of his Mitchell-verse setting.

I kept saying from the outset, and well into the middle of the book, that I hoped this wasn’t a narrative where the band, on the verge of breaking out, was swept away into nothingness by a bolt of their own stupidity suddenly striking them down. It didn’t turn out to be the case, and I was glad, but the ending that so many have found tear-jerking, I just found merely comforting that this band’s journey, and my time, wasn’t just brushed off into the waste bin leaving them exactly where they started.

Is this a great David Mitchell book? No, but by his standard, Utopia Avenue would be a great achievement by the vast majority of authors out there. The great Mitchell books remain “Cloud Atlas,” “…Jacob de Zoet,” and “The Bone Clocks,” but this is a solid read and well worth the time.