Best-selling novel by David Mitchell speaks of the visit of the rock music scene in 1960 Utopia Avenue New Roman

In the new novel by David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue, a member of the psychedelic band in 1960 folk-rock falling the book its name from an interviewer, the category of his eclectic music is required, they are. “You’re like a zoologist ask a platypus, ‘You Otter? Or an otter like duck duck?'” Answers Jasper, the virtuoso guitarist of the group. “Like the platypus, I do not care. We make music that we like. We hope that other people like it too. That’s all.” It ‘hard to read not as a wink Mitchell’s reputation for gender fluidity, given the work that novel historical (the thousand autumns of Jacob de Zoet), which Bildungsroman (Black Swan Green), science fiction (see Bone) and a combination of the above (cloud Atlas, is best known for). I ask why the novelist an ongoing video call, the platypus has 51-year-old giggles. “All artists are. In fact, all human beings. Is triggered not only in art, is what kind of person you are. We all beat the speed of reductionism.” And ‘the price agreed for his interest in ” hybridize typically “she says few, but seem to pay so much attention when Ian McEwan and Margaret Atwood does Mitchell qualified in their ranks; .. twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, his work has become the Haruki Murakami, Thomas Pynchon and Anthony Castello ess comparison. But it is in a field of its own. Its eight novels are approachable but experimental. His sets can be lyrical, but his prose is propulsive. Between the layers of unconventional structures are clear references and stories. Mitchell obsessions beyond the meta-fictional universe created man to travel self-fulfillment; the process of figuring out who we are and how we connect, in the short time we have. Speaking of video chat from the cottage in the south-west of Ireland, where he lived for 15 years, Mitchell engaging and boyish about his past interests with passion. He jokes about his reputation as an introverted life in locked block, he says: “Yes, but what else is new?” – and shows me excited her reading material, a richly illustrated collection of Vincent van Gogh’s letters. Read about the struggles of the painter has put his artistic life in perspective. “Some measure of success is actually the biggest enabler”, he says. “So I am reading it makes me feel happy that I have a [readers]. In my experience, the pain and poverty and failure is not really very good for writing life.” And yet this is the environment that inspired Mitchell pulling in Utopia Avenue characters. The novel is expansive, immersive to pursue one for the British and American music scene in 1967 and 1968, the band of the same sheet of detention in London shortage on the crest of worldwide fame. A linear narrative, especially in England put, it is a departure from, continents spread time-hopping works that he is best known. “It ‘s probably one of the most structurally simple things I’ve done,” he says. The rise of the group is primarily from the point of view of three of the band members considered, each following their own self-discovery trips: Elf folk singer, bassist and guitarist Dean Jasper. Early in the book, without Dean escapes an abusive working-class education. Elf is stifled by the expectations of their middle-class family. Jasper, the estranged son of an aristocratic Dutch family, the comparison with the return of mental health problems, he thought he had left behind there long. The germ of the novel her love was the music of that period, says band Mitchell as Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention and the Grateful Dead, they avoided compliance and find “new ways to put together a song, that was not really done before.” But was also in those years as fascinated fulcrum, reaches a time in 1960, “a kind of ideological critical mass where enough people thought that the company was rebootable” he says. “They could bring down the corrupt and repressive structures of the ancient world and replace it with something more just and more balanced.” The music, he adds, was “medium.” Above all, it is a book about music-a fly-on to make the wall look the realities of life from it, but also the process of writing and rehearsing songs. Mitchell has no background in music, but began to learn the guitar and the piano while writing the book to lend authenticity to scenes in which the characters try new arrangements and songs play together. He interviewed musicians and read about a dozen memories of survivors of that era, absorbing the details “such as collecting plankton,” he says. It also has a YouTube went down the rabbit hole. The technology is “a great resource for novelists,” he says. “If this was 2000, I would have no way do I find out what the voice of Syd Barrett. Now it’s easy. You just need a laptop.” This was particularly important as the novel fictional characters interact with a greatest hits historical figures such as his fame grows. Barrett, David Bowie, Brian Jones and many others wander in and out of the book, while the character shares a stage with Leonard Cohen and traveling with Jerry Garcia. Mitchell says that all these scenes the product of “careful study” of their language and speech. “It is necessary, therefore, do not start human characteristics to announce that they really have not,” he says. “I do not want to play a crucial role in the plot, or co-opted in an alternate universe in which they are not dead or have had a great influence on anything.” They are in the novel by the same token the music, because that’s how it really was. But this book is also available as a chapter in what Mitchell calls his “strange, overflowing novel.” Characters recurring and immortal connections from book to book, the player in a meta-narrative of a centuries-old struggle between the two groups. Here Regular readers will find at least a dozen links with his previous works locally, but the Jasper arc has a special meaning. (His surname, de Zoet can suggest how.) Mitchell says that while he enjoys fan maintenance, “Art in my books at the deepest level dipped,” he does not care alienate new readers. The fantastic novel sequences can be read as the product of mental illness Jaspers he says. “It ‘realism, if you’ve read my books, but if you do not have psychosis.” He suggests that Jasper may play a future role in the meta-fiction, but next up is working on a collection of his short stories, he has been rewritten so that the structure of his novel 1999 ghostwriter similarly connected. “It will be more contemporary and will not be historic,” he says. “I want to write ein, jetzt’Buch.” He has also worked on a possible television program, and a movie, even though he is reluctant to reveal details. He has conducted some work previously credited to a ventilated restart the matrix, of the original directors of the Wachowski brothers and the 2012 adaptation of Cloud Atlas. These types of collaborations are “a lot of fun,” says Mitchell, but also extremely important creative. “Normally I’ve seen working away for four years, no. I have no peers. Just try to work with anyone, but for four years. It does my head,” he says. “Yes to one or two projects say that you take outside the orbit of your habits is a long distance road between the novels of seating styles and themes. Hopefully there is a way you can develop.” This it appears in the 20 July 2020 issue of time.
Picture copyright by Clara Molden-Camera Press / Redux