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A review by cmarcatili
Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell
2.0
Remember the 2001 film, Rat Race, in which a seemingly random assortment of mid-to-top tier actors were thrown into an otherwise unremarkable comedy? Not really? Well the lesson was this: jamming in as many big names as you can get doesn't make for a great film.
The same lesson applies to novels, and historic fiction novels in particular.
Firstly, I should say that I love David Mitchell's books. I've read them all, some of them a few times over, and Cloud Atlas remains in my all-time top five. That I didn't like Utopia Avenue doesn't change my overall love of Mitchell's work. Every band has a few bad albums.
Utopia Avenue is the story of a band of four mismatched musical talents in the late 1960s London music scene. Manager Levon curates the band, pulling together the folk singer/song writer Elf Holloway, upstart rock bassist Dean Moss, psychedelic guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet, and jazz drummer 'Griff' Griffen. With three song writers in the band, their first album Paradise is the Road to Paradise is a mid-grade hit, and their second album shoots them across the pond to make it pretty big in the USA.
Readers of Mitchells other books will recognise the De Zoet name. His madness links him to Mitchell's multi-verse. So, too, does Elf's interactions with one of Cloud Atlas's characters, a certain young reporter for Spyglass Magazine. But unlike many of Mitchell's other novels, there's not much experimentation here with style, genre, perspective or even tone (except maybe for a few of de Zoet's scenes, which might come as a surprise if this is your first Mitchell book).
Along the way, the band encounters a range of life's ups and downs, and these dramas imbue their music with all the varieties of life. Each chapter is the title of one of their songs, and the book plays out like an episodic insight into the inspirations behind each song, while also revealing a larger story of the band's quick rise and fall across a few heady months of gigs, parties, fame, sex and drugs.
I suppose it should be no controversy, then, that London, New York, LA and San Fransisco are all bursting at the seams with big names. A chapter hardly passes where someone in the band doesn't bump into David Bowie, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen, Frank Zappa, Joni Mitchell, Mama Cass, or Brian Jones. You name it, they're either in the book, alluded to obliquely, or there's a scene where one of their albums is mentioned. And fair enough, right? The point is the band is mixing it with all the big names.
Except, most of the time these big names are thrown into the plot for no particular reason. Reading this book, I got sick of the number of times one of the characters would say some variation on: 'Wow! You're [insert musician here].' And the musician would reply with something like 'Yeah. And I think Utopia Avenue is great!'
I once heard advice for people planning to write historical fiction: don't throw in pointless cameos with well-known people from history. It's cliche and lazy. Unless the story is about that person, or they serve the story in some important way, leave them out. Utopia Avenue is the opposite of that advice. Like, early in the book someone bumps into Bowie in a stairway and has a conversation with him that doesn't add anything to the novel. They bump into him again, later, and the same thing happens. Neither interaction offers anything to the novel. This is true of nearly all the interactions with famous people throughout the plot. And worse, they're rarely portrayed with anything approaching complexity or offering any interesting insight to them as people. They appear on set, say a few words, and disappear. Conversations taking place with Syd Barrett could be happening with Jimi Hendrix and you wouldn't notice the difference. The famous musicians in the novel are essentially set pieces, and a lot of the book reads like wish-fulfilment.
I could have looked past that, and just embraced it for what it was. But the real problem with Utopia Avenue, for me at least, was that it felt incredibly rushed, which is a remarkable feat given it runs at almost 600 pages.
Rushed because there are long passages that contribute almost nothing to the plot, except to name-drop half a dozen well-known musicians. Rushed because naming songs playing in the background is a technique often used instead of actually evoking a scene or emotion. Rushed because there are so many moments that are supposed to have high impact and they often occur without preamble (e.g. a live-on-TV punch-up). So many of these moments just rush by, a catalogue of misfortunes, all of them feeling jammed in for the sake of it without much emotional weight. Rushed, too, because my edition was full of editing issues, like typos, confused over-reliance on italics, and the exact same sentence copied and pasted from one paragraph to another on the next page (I saw this at least twice, in one example Dean goes out to the back patio and then, a page later, Dean goes out to the back patio).
In other words, I think Utopia Avenue could have been a good book if Mitchell had been given about another year to work on it. A few more editing rounds, cutting a good 200 pages or so, focusing on the heart of the narrative rather than all the unneeded cameos, and a much more thorough edit would have really helped this book shine. It sits on my shelf along with every other Mitchell book, but it won't be one I revisit any time soon.
The same lesson applies to novels, and historic fiction novels in particular.
Firstly, I should say that I love David Mitchell's books. I've read them all, some of them a few times over, and Cloud Atlas remains in my all-time top five. That I didn't like Utopia Avenue doesn't change my overall love of Mitchell's work. Every band has a few bad albums.
Utopia Avenue is the story of a band of four mismatched musical talents in the late 1960s London music scene. Manager Levon curates the band, pulling together the folk singer/song writer Elf Holloway, upstart rock bassist Dean Moss, psychedelic guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet, and jazz drummer 'Griff' Griffen. With three song writers in the band, their first album Paradise is the Road to Paradise is a mid-grade hit, and their second album shoots them across the pond to make it pretty big in the USA.
Readers of Mitchells other books will recognise the De Zoet name. His madness links him to Mitchell's multi-verse. So, too, does Elf's interactions with one of Cloud Atlas's characters, a certain young reporter for Spyglass Magazine. But unlike many of Mitchell's other novels, there's not much experimentation here with style, genre, perspective or even tone (except maybe for a few of de Zoet's scenes, which might come as a surprise if this is your first Mitchell book).
Along the way, the band encounters a range of life's ups and downs, and these dramas imbue their music with all the varieties of life. Each chapter is the title of one of their songs, and the book plays out like an episodic insight into the inspirations behind each song, while also revealing a larger story of the band's quick rise and fall across a few heady months of gigs, parties, fame, sex and drugs.
I suppose it should be no controversy, then, that London, New York, LA and San Fransisco are all bursting at the seams with big names. A chapter hardly passes where someone in the band doesn't bump into David Bowie, John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen, Frank Zappa, Joni Mitchell, Mama Cass, or Brian Jones. You name it, they're either in the book, alluded to obliquely, or there's a scene where one of their albums is mentioned. And fair enough, right? The point is the band is mixing it with all the big names.
Except, most of the time these big names are thrown into the plot for no particular reason. Reading this book, I got sick of the number of times one of the characters would say some variation on: 'Wow! You're [insert musician here].' And the musician would reply with something like 'Yeah. And I think Utopia Avenue is great!'
I once heard advice for people planning to write historical fiction: don't throw in pointless cameos with well-known people from history. It's cliche and lazy. Unless the story is about that person, or they serve the story in some important way, leave them out. Utopia Avenue is the opposite of that advice. Like, early in the book someone bumps into Bowie in a stairway and has a conversation with him that doesn't add anything to the novel. They bump into him again, later, and the same thing happens. Neither interaction offers anything to the novel. This is true of nearly all the interactions with famous people throughout the plot. And worse, they're rarely portrayed with anything approaching complexity or offering any interesting insight to them as people. They appear on set, say a few words, and disappear. Conversations taking place with Syd Barrett could be happening with Jimi Hendrix and you wouldn't notice the difference. The famous musicians in the novel are essentially set pieces, and a lot of the book reads like wish-fulfilment.
I could have looked past that, and just embraced it for what it was. But the real problem with Utopia Avenue, for me at least, was that it felt incredibly rushed, which is a remarkable feat given it runs at almost 600 pages.
Rushed because there are long passages that contribute almost nothing to the plot, except to name-drop half a dozen well-known musicians. Rushed because naming songs playing in the background is a technique often used instead of actually evoking a scene or emotion. Rushed because there are so many moments that are supposed to have high impact and they often occur without preamble (e.g. a live-on-TV punch-up). So many of these moments just rush by, a catalogue of misfortunes, all of them feeling jammed in for the sake of it without much emotional weight. Rushed, too, because my edition was full of editing issues, like typos, confused over-reliance on italics, and the exact same sentence copied and pasted from one paragraph to another on the next page (I saw this at least twice, in one example Dean goes out to the back patio and then, a page later, Dean goes out to the back patio).
In other words, I think Utopia Avenue could have been a good book if Mitchell had been given about another year to work on it. A few more editing rounds, cutting a good 200 pages or so, focusing on the heart of the narrative rather than all the unneeded cameos, and a much more thorough edit would have really helped this book shine. It sits on my shelf along with every other Mitchell book, but it won't be one I revisit any time soon.