They are brought together and in due course managed by Levon Frankland, previously seen as a much older man in The Bone Clocks, whose fur hat and blue glasses Dean worriedly parses as those of “a queer beatnik”. The band comprises the middle-class folk singer Elf Holloway, who calls to mind Sandy Denny, and who is cautiously examining her sexuality Jasper de Zoet, whose genius on lead guitar is compromised by aural hallucinations Dean Moss, bassist, not yet wrenched out of his traumatising family past and the drummer Griff, who is of the four the most opaque, though we are assured he is a Yorkshireman. What comes of age is Utopia Avenue, “the most curious British band you’ve never heard of”. At first, it appears closer in theme and style to the semi-autobiographical Black Swan Green than to the giddying, multivalent Cloud Atlas or The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: it is placed firmly and with pleasing particularity in the 1960s, and is in effect a coming-of-age novel.
D avid Mitchell’s eighth novel, Utopia Avenue, arrives both as a distinct and distinctive book, and as a further chapter in the ongoing “metanovel” that constitutes his work to date.
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