Or perhaps Mitchell hopes to educate younger readers about a historical and cultural milieu he obviously adores. Perhaps life in London at that time really did resemble It’ s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the exemplar of a goofy ’60s subgenre of movie comedy featuring scads of cameos by famous faces. Not once but thrice Jasper bumps into a (pre-famous) David Bowie on a doorstep. The band’s next-door neighbor during their stay in Laurel Canyon is Joni Mitchell. Elf steps into an elevator in New York and meets Leonard Cohen. The gang seemingly can’t walk into a room without encountering movie stars (Peter Sellers, Michael Caine), rock gods (Keith Moon, Brian Jones, Steve Marriott), counterculture icons (Allen Ginsberg), and even, on one occasion, Princess Margaret.
It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it, because the celebrities in Utopia Avenue come thick and fast. Griff quickly recovers from the depression following his accident to return to his key role of uttering lines like “Chuffin’ heck, it’s Jimi Hendrix!” and “Janis fookin’ Joplin?” Levon goes to a gay bar and meets Francis Bacon. Jasper has a malevolent 18 th century Japanese abbot exorcised from his psyche, the way you do. Elf ditches her bad boyfriend and falls in love with a character from Cloud Atlas. Dean snorts coke before a gig and performs badly, then vows never to get high before going onstage again. Yet all of these personal challenges and more get tied up as tidily as three-minute pop songs. It’s an inner travelogue.” Taken altogether, though, do the albums of any band form a shapely, novelistic storyline? Aren’t they more like a jumble of episodes assembled by chance and circumstance, a bit too much like life itself? Pepper’ s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the first time, and Levon marvels, “ Wow. Songs often follow narratives, and albums sometimes do in one scene, the members of Utopia Avenue listen to Sgt. This makes for a highly schematic structure that doesn’t do the novel any favors. Elf, Dean, and Jasper write most of the tracks, so most of the chapters are told from the point of view of one of these three, but Griff and Levon provide the lyrics for one song apiece and get chapters accordingly. Each chapter takes the title of a song and recounts the events that inspired that song. Each of the novel’s six parts represents one side of the band’s three LP records.
It ends in San Francisco during the autumn of ’68 with a tragic but utterly random catastrophe.
The band begins in London, as a musical blind date engineered by Levon Frankland (himself from The Bone Clocks), who is here a nattily dressed Canadian clearly modeled on Beatles manager Brian Epstein. The overarching plot of Utopia Avenue is one long climb. An irony of Mitchell’s work is that the more overtly he strives for fantasy, the less magical his fiction becomes.
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