Status Updates From Utopia Avenue

The road to paradise is paradise. Once arrived in Garden Eden, you discover, it is not paradise. Music on the way can be inspiration when it meets fertile soil.
Finally, Utopia Avenue is trademark Mitchell with the horologists discovering the link between Jacob and Jasper almost 200 years later. Knock Knock gets a name.

Stays in the mold of historical fiction. No deeper insights, no challenging literary means. Just narrating life as it was or could have been. But highly entertaining in an interesting period and place. Structuring it into LP sides for the parts and titles for the chapters is a nice idea.
Utopia Avenue is seeing success after Dean's return from an Italian prison and they are reaching for the top. I root for them.

The integration into the Mitchell-verse elevates it. The incorporeal Mongolian and the DJ Bat Segundo from Ghostwritten, Jasper de Zoet as descendant of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, the obscure compositions of Robert Frobisher from Cloud Atlas reappearing.
Add to this cameos of more or less known VIPs. Levon Frankland just had a gay night with Francis Bacon in the Colony Room of Muriel Belcher.

The band got its record deal, the first single just hit Top of the Pops. Jasper talks with Brian Jones about voices in the head. Jimmy Savile is creepy as hell. Utopia Avenue leads to the epicenter of the Swinging Sixties.
The characters are workable, so far they are on their heroes' journey. The breaking points are designated though. The immaterial being in the head of Jasper being the most noteable.