Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


David Mitchell is a great story-teller, and here he uses that talent to sublime effect in a historical fiction recreation of the late 1960s. In the process, he takes a collection of stock characters and breathes life into them.
He is very kind to the real-life people he includes, portraying them first and foremost as dedicated to developing their talents as musicians more than their drug habits. The only jarring note in his evocation of the 1960s concerns language habits: he has English characters using 21st century colloquialisms (e.g. the rhetorical “even” instead of “What on earth” or “What the [expletive]” and “going down” instead of “going on” to mean “happen”) decades before they slipped into Britspeak.
Unfortunately, rather than simply present us with a superb piece of historical fiction, Mitchell tries to link this novel up with other works of his, via the character of Jasper de Zoet, and to do so finds it necessary to weigh the book down with a great lump of frankly stupid fantasy. Ah, well.



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