Griff quickly recovers from the depression following his accident to return to his key role of uttering lines like “Chuffin’ heck, it’s Jimi Hendrix!” and “Janis fookin’ Joplin?” Levon goes to a gay bar and meets Francis Bacon. Jasper has a malevolent 18 th century Japanese abbot exorcised from his psyche, the way you do. Elf ditches her bad boyfriend and falls in love with a character from Cloud Atlas. Dean snorts coke before a gig and performs badly, then vows never to get high before going onstage again. Yet all of these personal challenges and more get tied up as tidily as three-minute pop songs. It’s an inner travelogue.” Taken altogether, though, do the albums of any band form a shapely, novelistic storyline? Aren’t they more like a jumble of episodes assembled by chance and circumstance, a bit too much like life itself? Pepper’ s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the first time, and Levon marvels, “ Wow. Songs often follow narratives, and albums sometimes do in one scene, the members of Utopia Avenue listen to Sgt. This makes for a highly schematic structure that doesn’t do the novel any favors. Elf, Dean, and Jasper write most of the tracks, so most of the chapters are told from the point of view of one of these three, but Griff and Levon provide the lyrics for one song apiece and get chapters accordingly. Each chapter takes the title of a song and recounts the events that inspired that song. Each of the novel’s six parts represents one side of the band’s three LP records. It ends in San Francisco during the autumn of ’68 with a tragic but utterly random catastrophe. The band begins in London, as a musical blind date engineered by Levon Frankland (himself from The Bone Clocks), who is here a nattily dressed Canadian clearly modeled on Beatles manager Brian Epstein. The overarching plot of Utopia Avenue is one long climb. David Mitchell's new novel is the story of Utopia Avenue and its age of riots in the street and revolutions in the head of drugs and thugs, schizophrenia, love, sex, grief, art of the families we choose and the ones we don't of fame's Faustian pact and stardom's wobbly ladder.An irony of Mitchell’s work is that the more overtly he strives for fantasy, the less magical his fiction becomes. Emerging from London's psychedelic scene in 1967 and fronted by folksinger Elf Holloway, guitar demigod Jasper de Zoet and blues bassist Dean Moss, Utopia Avenue released only two LPs during its brief blazing journey from the clubs of Soho and draughty ballrooms to Top of the Pops and the Top 10 to Amsterdam, Rome and a fateful American fortnight in the autumn of 1968. Utopia Avenue may be the most extraordinary British band you've never heard of. The hotly anticipated new novel from the internationally bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas.
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