Number 23 - Utopia Avenue - David Mitchell

 

Another book with an incredibly bland cover.  I ordered the psychadelic cover from World Of Books but this is the one they sent me.  More than a little irritating.

However, the contents are the important part. This is a semi contemporary novel so I had high hopes for it (I find Mitchell's forays into distant history to be very tedious, but his writing set in times of living memory tend to be great)

And I wasn't disappointed.  Mitchell well and truly hit it out of the park with this book.  At nearly 600 pages it's a bit of a doorstop but it reads so easily it felt half that length.

I might be a few books behind on my total from last year, but my word count must be a lot higher. This is the 4th book so far that exceeds 500 pages by a distance.

It tells the story of a brief flash in the psychadelic music scene in the late 60s. We start with Dean, a down on his luck bassist who, on the worst day of his young life to date - lost his job, his money and his home - he runs into Levon, a music producer/manager, who takes him to watch a band playing at a venue nearby. Here he first meets Jasper de Zoet and Peter Griff Griffin a guitarist/singer and a jazz drummer respectively. They form a band together under Levon's guidance and are soon joined by Elf Holloway, a folk singer/guitarist/keyboard player.  thus the new band on the block - Utopia Avenue is formed.

The book follows them through the ups and downs of musical life - from a first gig that couldn't possibly go worse to breaking into the American music scene.  They run into many prominent figures of the late 60's scene.

The time period is drawn fantastically. It feels completely real. The characters are drawn equally well.  When their personal lives turn bad, we feel for them.  

On top of all this there are many nods to his other books, some more subtle than others.  Spotting the Easter eggs adds a whole new layer of fun into the book. 

I wasn't 100% certain that Jasper's storyline fitted the overall tone of the novel - especially when it became unapologetically supernatural in nature.  As brilliant and as tense as it was in the final segments, it sat oddly with the realism of the rest of the book.

That was a minor quibble though. I raced through this in just under a week. It's compelling, it's funny, it's sad, it's a fabulous portrait of 50's England seen through the eyes of a very different set of characters, a psychadellic head trip through the late 60s music scene.. What more do you want?