Elf, the keyboardist and songwriter for Utopia Avenue, gets stuck in an elevator with a flirty jokester named Lenny who claims to be Jim Morrison. He’s obviously not. “I’ve seen lollipop ladies in Blackpool who look more like Jim Morrison than you” (420), says Elf. Lenny (who turns out to be the Canadian songwriter and poet better known by his full name, Leonard) advices Elf about the slow pace of the elevator. She replied that she was in no mad rush to which Lenny offers this bit of wisdom:

Good for you. The word ‘faster’ is becoming a synonym of ‘better.’ As if the goal of human evolution is to be a sentient bullet. (420)

What a great line. Pithy, incisive, humorous. And that’s the sort of dialogue you’ll find in every chapter of Utopia Avenue, David Mitchell’s novel about a fictional band that lives in the very real world of the late 1960s.

At almost 600 pages, this is no light commitment, but the pages fly by. Each chapter is written from the perspective of a different bandmate as they go from poor musicians to global touring artists.

Speaking of different perspectives, the guitarist is Jasper De Zoet. If you recognize that name, you may have read Mitchell’s earlier work, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. If you’ve read that, then you probably know a bit about Horologists and Anchorites—atemporals who provide a bizarre science-fiction flair and run like a leitmotif through Mitchell’s corpus. It seems strange to encounter the atemporals in an otherwise piece of historical fiction, and I’m still not sure how it works with the story. But it does. I couldn’t get enough.

We’re still waiting to see what David Mitchell will write next. Thankfully, I have more of his back catalogue to mine.

Mitchell, David. Utopia Avenue. Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2020.