Books I Didn't Finish: Utopia Avenue

Note: I’m afraid I’m once again going to have to take a blog break while I get some health issues under control. I had this post mostly completed before my current round of brain problems kicked off, but I wasn’t able to finish it, so I’m throwing it up incomplete.

Presented for your enjoyment: the thrilling story of why I bailed on a book 85% of the way through.

David Mitchell is best known for Cloud Atlas, which I have not read. Prior to checking out Utopia Avenue, his latest release, I had only read Ghostwritten. I thought it was decent, but not decent enough that I was motivated to go out and read any of his other stuff.

Utopia Avenue is, at first glance, a more down to earth story than his other work, being about a fictional London band in 1967 rising to stardom alongside the many musical legends that arose from that particular time and place.

 David Mitchell is very keen on letting you know about those legends: up until the point where I abruptly stopped reading, the only real issue I had with the story was the egregious celebrity cameos, as our young band members cross paths with seemingly every major figure in the overlapping music and underground scenes (Francis Bacon! Jimi Hendrix! Jimmy Savile! Janis Joplin! Leonard Cohen! The Rolling Stones! John Lennon!). Often these meetings happen at locations where you would expect to bump into such people in 1967 (backstage at Top Of The Pops, fancy parties where the hosts are deliberately inviting famous musicians), but there’s also a random David Bowie encounter that even Bowie admits he has no real reason for being present for, among others.

So to an extent this entire novel is fanfiction on the part of Mitchell. Like early fanfic writers putting self-insert characters onto the bridge of the Enterprise, Mitchell is vicariously experiencing a time and a place that he wasn’t around to witness via his fictional bandmates (and having those bandmates write lyrics which are both reproduced in whole or in part for the reader, and which are highly praised by actual famous musicians--always a dangerous game, although for what it’s worth I personally think Utopia Avenue’s lyrics are quite good).

If you’re willing to get onboard with such an act of obvious self-indulgence, and if you can look past the fact that a novel about the Power Of Music is inherently not going to be able to communicate that power particularly well, then Utopia Avenue is a pretty fun read. The book wavers between a gritty, realistic depiction of late 60s England and a starry-eyed idealist version with all the rough edges sanded down before lurching heavily in the latter direction, which is a bit of a let down, but still: a fun read.

Until it stumbles ass-backwards down the shared universe hole, and lands right next to the pile of Stephen King books that have also fallen down the shared universe hole.

One of the band members is a troubled young man named Jasper, who in addition to apparently being on the autism spectrum (he doesn’t know what emotions and facial expressions are, which is how you know fictional characters are on the spectrum) is suffering from some sort of schizeophrenic disorder that manifests as Knock Knock, a malevolent entity that once brought him to the brink of suicide, but which has been held at bay for several years as of the start of the story. As the book progresses, Knock Knock comes back.

This is the classic Hitchcock “bomb under the table” source of tension. You, the reader, know that once Knock Knock fully re-enters Jasper’s mind it’s going to end his music career, and since Jasper’s virtuoso guitar playing is one of the linchpins holding the band together, it’s probably going to mean the end of Utopia Avenue as well. The crisis comes to a head right as the band are about to play their first American show, propelling them into the big leagues. Jasper enters a fugue state, Knock Knock blasts through the defences he’s erected and asserts control, Jasper collapses on stage--

And then time freezes--this is described from the perspective of one of the other characters, not Jasper--and a bunch of invisible time-travelling wizard-spirits show up to whisk Jasper on a journey through his ancestors’ pasts, revealing that Knock Knock is an evil 19th-century Japanese monk who killed children in order to steal their life essence and attain immortality, and his spirit has been hitch-hiking in Jasper’s mind, so they manage to get rid of him by offering him another body to inhabit, and Jasper is completely cured.

I had previously noted that Jasper shared a surname, de Zoet, with the title character of another one of Mitchell’s books, and I vaguely remembered that the synopsis of The Bone Clocks involved some sort of supernatural time stuff, and that’s when I said “Hang on, is David Mitchell pulling a Stephen King?” 

So, I checked, and it turns out that yes, David Mitchell was pulling a Stephen King. All the shit with the Japanese monk is from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and the Horologists are from The Bone Clocks and apparently several other Mitchell novels.

A couple of things about that.

I am usually all for contemporary novels that smuggle in some suggestion of supernatural or magical occurrences. I love that shit. But those elements should ideally come sufficiently early in the story that they don’t feel like a huge deus ex machina, and there should be an element of ambiguity as to their nature and reality. Neither is the case here.

To be fair, it would be wrong to say that this comes completely out of nowhere. Jasper has several visions of the monk from relatively early in the book, and we learn that his teenage suicide attempt was averted by the intervention of a friendly spirit that temporarily sealed Knock Knock away from the rest of his brain. But only Jasper experiences these things, and so naturally the reader will assume they’re just schizophrenic delusions (especially if, as was the case for me, they’re not familiar with Mitchell’s shared universe and don’t spot the references to his past books). Also, most of this is happening in the London music world during the height of the psychedelic drug craze, and we see Jasper using drugs recreationally. Naturally, the reader is going to assume that the visions are a combination of hallucination and drug trip.

(This also raises a question the book never answers: if Jasper genuinely isn’t mentally ill, what’s up with the weird, vaguely unsettling encounters he has with famous musicians throughout the novel, which are strongly implied to not have been real?)

If I may indulge in a bit of irresponsible theorizing, the scene just before Jasper collapses and the Horologists teleport in to banish Knock Knock is described twice, once from Jasper’s perspective and once from another band member’s perspective (as far as I can remember, this is the only time the book shows the same event from two points of view). The way the whole scene plays out from the non-Jasper perspective comes across like someone being cured of mental illness and/or depression by the Power Of Music: Jasper is acting weird, playing lethargically and with no energy, then they get to one of the songs he composed and which has great personal significance to him, and he suddenly snaps out of it and starts absolutely shredding the fuck out of his guitar.

I’m wondering if maybe something like this wasn’t the original intention, and then Mitchell or someone else realized it would be trite and possibly a bit offensive and decided to go in another direction. If so, he should have stuck to the original plan. 

Regardless of why the book ended up this way, the effect on the story is ruinous. Right after this we go back to one of the other characters having an affair, and I found that I was now incapable of caring. The reality of the story had been undermined too severely. Moreover, the way Jasper’s character arc plays out made me extremely skeptical that the other character’s arcs were going to be worth my time (according to reviews I’ve seen, my suspicions were well founded).

This whole debacle is more problematic when taken in the context of the overall tonal shift that occurs throughout the story. It’s clear from early on that the band members of Utopia Avenue, while meshing extremely well creatively, have various interpersonal mismatches that are going to be a major problem moving forward. They grate on each other’s nerves when forced to spend time in specific combinations, there’s a massive class divide splitting the band down the middle, the usual rift forms between the band and their manager, and there’s the persistent problem of Elf, the only woman in the group, feeling that the others talk over her and won’t take her suggestions seriously (exacerbated by the public and the media assuming she’s just there for eye candy). These are clearly positioned as major stress points that are going to eventually lead to trouble.

But then they just...don’t. The arguments and personal tiffs cease, Elf stops talking about her issues with the guys, everyone starts getting along better. Maybe all that stuff comes back in the final chapters of the book, but that would be its own flaw.

I think the overall issue here is that at some point David Mitchell became Utopia Avenue’s biggest fan, and he wasn’t willing to let his favourite band experience anything too nasty. Thus, the ticking time bomb of Jasper’s mental health gets swept under the rug, and the other carefully-seeded interpersonal problems get left behind in favour of everyone telling each other how great they are and basking in the praise of critics and fans.