No surprise it didn't even make the Booker short list. It read to me like wish fulfilment fiction on the part of Mitchell. Most of the time it just didn't ring true. There are some great sentences but there are also way too many bum notes for me. Like not being able to get off a Big Dipper. Over a 600 page novel the presence of so much melodrama and high emotion becomes tiresome. This worked in Cloud Atlas because the narratives were short. Ultimately his attention always shifts to what's larger than normal life. The daily personal challenges and relationships we all go through in life seem to bore David Mitchell. This band experiences more drama in a year than any other band in their entire careers. A sex slave ring, brought in briefly to provide some more cheap frisson. Much of the melodrama has no purpose - a fatal car crash, forgotten almost immediately after it occurs.
Review utopia avenue full#
It's a novel full of melodrama with very little character interaction.
Bondage sex fuelled by cocaine, paternity suits, blackmail, adultery scandal, plagiarism, and all within the space of a year. Often it reads like a tabloid vision of a rock band. The speed and ease with which Dean and Elf exorcise their demons is barely less trite. The vapid way in which his mental health issues are overnight cured is pure silliness. Jasper de Zoet is a descendent of Jacob and is more interesting until all the magical metanovel stuff arrives. The less said about the hackneyed drummer the better. Elf probably gets my vote as the most anaemic female character I've encountered all year - always lovesick - no surprise even Mitchell seems to lose interest in her half way through the novel. And the relentless replacing of you with yer in his speech grated like hell. The problem is, Mitchell wants us to like him so his villainy serves little purpose. Dean, the bass player, is insidiously obnoxious and would make a splendid villain. It's like he's so smitten with the band he's created he neglects to bother much about its components. When I think of how many memorable characters he created in Cloud Atlas it's baffling that here he couldn't come up with a single one of compelling interest. Like the long gratuitous passages of crass chit chat and the Madame Tussauds cast of dead rock stars who each appear for a cameo appearance but who are mostly as silly and gimmicky as waxworks. In fact, at times it seems like 90% dressing with a thin story running through it. He lovingly describes their songs and provides us with (longwinded dreary) interviews they give to the press. He writes about them with fidgety infatuated excitement. This often struck me as a novel written with too much glee and not enough artistry.
They at least though were entertaining in their silly madcap way. The decline began with The Bone Clocks and Slade House. My love affair with Mitchell reached its peak with Cloud Atlas. I hate to say this but, after some entertainment early on, I found Utopia Avenue irritating, vapid and often boring. Mitchell's American editor at Random House is novelist David Ebershoff. In 2007, Mitchell was listed among Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World. In 2003, he was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. His two subsequent novels, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The novel won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for best work of British literature written by an author under 35) and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. I would probably have become a writer wherever I lived, but would I have become the same writer if I'd spent the last 6 years in London, or Cape Town, or Moose Jaw, on an oil rig or in the circus? This is my answer to myself." Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), moves around the globe, from Okinawa to Mongolia to pre-Millennial New York City, as nine narrators tell stories that interlock and intersect.
In an essay for Random House, Mitchell wrote: "I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but until I came to Japan to live in 1994 I was too easily distracted to do much about it. After another stint in Japan, he currently lives in Ireland with his wife Keiko and their two children. He lived for a year in Sicily, then moved to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students for eight years, before returning to England. David Mitchell was born in Southport, Merseyside, in England, raised in Malvern, Worcestershire, and educated at the University of Kent, studying for a degree in English and American Literature followed by an M.A.
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