This book was brilliant in so many ways--the author's economic yet evocative descriptions of varied parts of England in the 1960s, elements of the road and studio life of a band that wants to make it big, and most of all the richly portrayed, multifaceted characters. I loved traveling with Utopia Avenue on the road, learning more about the characters' lives and their struggles (some huge), and the wildness in their lives as well as the mundane.

Utopia Avenue is a British band in the late 1960s. Their music is a combination of folk, psychedelia, rock, and blues. Honestly, I don't think I would have enjoyed their music, but I definitely enjoyed David Mitchell's novel about this fictional band. We follow the individual members of the band from before they become a group until the end. Elf is the female keyboardist/vocalist, Dean is the male bassist/vocalist, Jasper is the male guitar virtuoso/vocalist, and Griff keeps them all in time as the drummer.

The story gives the background of different songs that the group records during their rise to fame. Jasper is fighting mental illness, Elf is trying to prove that she is not the "token" woman in the band, and Dean never quite seems to be able to break out of his hard luck life. The story encompasses real musicians from that time period in a way that mostly works, so if you are a fan of music from that time this novel will mean much more to you. I wonder what a younger person would experience reading this book if they are not aware of the real musicians that appear throughout the book? I fear the story would lose some of its magic.

This is the first time I have read David Mitchell and it will not be the last. His writing is exquisite. It took some getting used to his lyrical and sometimes superfluous style, but I quickly learned to just go with it. It always paid off. I look forward to exploring his back catalog. I understand there are links between his older works and Utopia Avenue.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in musicianship and the art and business of creating music. Book clubs will find a lot to discuss with this novel. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this novel. Mitchell is definitely giving lots of winks to his previous novels and characters, and if you've read ANY of his previous no novels, you're sure to recognize a few here!
This novel struck me as kind of a man's novel, if I may say, There just seemed to be a lot of bad sexual jokes in the first couple of chapters, and I really felt like I could've done without those. But then things improved, and I actually ended up really loving this novel. Not my favorite Mitchell (I think I love Slade House the most), but definitely a fun read. This will make a perfect holiday gift, either for the Mitchell fan in your life, or for that special someone who LOVES the singing 60s in England! There are lots of music, cultural, and literary references of the time periods. A great read!

"David Mitchell is a writer of many talents, a literary wizard whose works display a range and extent that are the criterion for any great novelist. His prose is sharp and swift, he’s light-handed and ambidextrous, and able to blend disparate genres into a modus vivendi that has proven conducive to Hollywood adaptions. His best book is Cloud Atlas, a matryoshka doll of six thematically connected narratives, which, if one were making a premature list of Best Books Since 2000, would be a strong contender for the top spot."

Excerpt from:
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/heaven-metal/

Haven’t finished Utopia Avenue yet but the book is a fascinating read and I certainly intend to finish it. It is incredibly well written and definitely holds the reader’s interest. I’ll be able to write a better review after I finish reading.

When I think of stories that I love, they tend to be heavy on the action and adventure, with a strong plot and even stronger characters. Stories I usually avoid are those that don't seem to go anywhere and that mimic reality a bit too much. Novels by David Mitchell, in my mind, usually fall into the former category, which is why I jumped at the opportunity to read his latest novel, Utopia Avenue. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Utopia Avenue is not at all an adventure story but rather more of that latter category that I try to avoid. This time, though, I am so glad I did not avoid it at all.

Utopia Avenue is a phenomenal story of four very different people who come together to form a band in the late 1960s while the world changes around them. As a character-driven novel, Mr. Mitchell takes great care to create characters and develop them to the point where their stories become real in your mind. To enhance that feel of reality, he intersperses interactions between some of the top musicians and celebrities of the time.

Not only are the characters fabulous in their very real issues, which includes everything from mental illness to financial problems to relationship drama, but Mr. Mitchell also finds a way to create their music through words. He provides enough context for most readers to be able to parse together the very exploratory sounds the band creates. For those readers with a broader musical understanding, he makes you wish there were Utopia Avenue albums you could discover for yourself.

Utopia Avenue may not be exciting. There are no car chases, no magical spells, no quests the band must achieve. At its essence, it is a simple story about a group of four people who are as different as could be but come together through their love of music and performing and a need to make a name for themselves. We see their struggles and their successes and watch them grow into a family through all of it. Through Mr. Mitchell's stellar writing, nothing happens but everything happens. Utopia Avenue may not be the type of story I traditionally enjoy, but it will go on the list as one of my favorite novels of 2020.

Requested as background reading for an editorial feature on BookBrowse:
https://www.bookbrowse.com/mag/reviews/index.cfm/ref/hc263936/utopia-avenue#reviews

I’ll always read the next David Mitchell novel. And while I’m enamored with his more metafictional and quirky works, this novel was diverting and certainly captured a mood, time, and place.

Wow, I got sucked right in to this book. I am a child of the 90s, but have an appreciation for the mystique & music from the late 1960s. I am also a huge fan of David Mitchell's complex storytelling through the voices of multiple characters, and I found this work to be more accessible than other of his books like Cloud Atlas.

The story of four strangers, really five if you count their manager, coming together to form a talented band was wonderful on its own. It was also fun to have characters such as Janis Joplin, David Bowie, and Mama Cass show up at varying stages in their fame. I felt very compelled to keep reading, and was sad when it ended.

Utopia Avenue is the band name chosen by a group of four musicians in London in 1967. They're a motley crew, but the music they make together is greater than the sum of their parts. As they fight to break onto the Billboard charts, traveling around Britain in a dubious van and giving interviews, they become close and write some great songs. But as they begin to break through, and to rub shoulders with the great musicians of their time, they also deal with hurdles and heartbreak, from mental illness to a stint in an Italian jail.

David Mitchell's newest novel is pure wish fulfillment. Mitchell has a great deal of fun chronicling the adventures of Elf, Griff, Jasper, Dean and their determined and cheerful manager Levon, as they give a disastrously hilarious interview on Dutch TV, run into everyone from David Bowie to Janis Joplin and enjoy the taste of fame. And because this is Mitchell, there's a touch of the fantastic that shows up abruptly three-quarters through the novel involving the guitarist, Jasper de Zoet. This novel is a lot of fun, but slighter than Mitchell's other novels. There's a lot more detail about the writing of each song the band releases, and who wrote what and why, than I wanted but this may be of more interest to the musically-inclined.

I had such a hard time rating Utopia Avenue. The first 50% was a struggle to get through. While I was interested in the characters and their journeys, the building up of the band and their early struggles, something about the pacing, or perhaps getting used to the jumpiness of the timeline from paragraph to paragraph (Mitchell employed flashbacks in an interesting way, but it did make it hard to follow the storyline), made it difficult for me to focus on the book for more than a few pages at a time. I was in it because these characters were so human, so flawed and yet easy to love nonetheless. There was a fair amount of very sly humor in the dialogue that made up for the duller exposition.
But then somewhere around the halfway mark things started to pick up. It wasn't that the characters got more compelling, because I was in love with these beautifully imperfect artists from the start, but something I can't pinpoint flipped and I couldn't put down my ebook. I think it was that we got more about the band outside of their lives in the band at that point; there was a lot of tragedy across the band, a lot of personal growth, that made the book something more than 'let's watch this band claw their way to popularity', which ultimately made for a more immersive and deeper story.
So I was at 4 stars on this one– 3 for the slow beginning, 5 for the way it picked up from the middle– and then I got to the end. No spoilers, but that ending definitely pushed it up to a 4.5 stars rounded up. Don't take my word for it; go fall in love with Utopia Avenue– the band, the story– yourself.

A book about the formation and rise to fame of a fictional 60s-era rock band? I’m in.

Rating: 5 stars

The gist: This one was right up my alley– expertly-written dialogue, characters you want to root for, and a laundry list of famous musicians as actual characters. I don’t want to know how many royalties Mitchell paid the Bowie estate for the sentence “David Bowie crunched an ice cube.”

Writing: As a David Mitchell newbie, I knew this book had the potential to get weird, but I knew next to nothing about his writing style. It turns out that he writes some of the most readable, plot-driven dialogue I’ve ever seen. Mitchell’s dialogue is witty, it flows incredibly well, and it’s chock-full of quips and references. Sometimes it’s a slog to get through mundane dialogue that adds nothing to the plot. Not the case here!

Setting: This book is essentially a who’s who of 60s-70s musicians. Our main characters chat with David Bowie, get advice from Janis Joplin, party at Cass Elliott’s house, and drop acid with Jerry Garcia. Some find this too gimmicky and forced, but I felt that it fit well with the book’s humor.

Characters: And speaking of musicians, I really liked the band we meet in this book! Elf, Dean, Jasper, and Griff definitely feel like real members of a 60s rock group, and I’m kind of sad that I can’t search for Darkroom or Prove It on YouTube. I particularly felt drawn to Elf and Dean– and I actually cried upon finishing the book. Why do fictional rock bands have to be fictional?

Final Thoughts: Like any good rock album, this book left me with a sense that I’d just finished something great. Time to check out the artist’s greatest hits!

A trippy, cinematic version of Daisy Jones.

By the end, you'll feel like Elf, Griff, Jasper, and Dean are old friends. Writing about music is notoriously difficult, but this was the best attempt I've come across. The writing is descriptive and artsy without becoming pretentious. Fun cameos from famous 60s characters are sprinkled throughout. This was my first David Mitchell, but I definitely intend to explore further now. I took longer than intended to finish this, but mostly because I was savoring it.

I'm a huge fan of David Mitchell (I couldn't fit all the books into the picture) and this novel was highly anticipated, *and* I love novels with a music theme. This novel is about a band in 1960s UK, and the chapters move between their perspectives as new songs are written and recorded (the sections of the book are grouped by sides.) There are a lot of connections to his other works, because everything is all part of one übernovel - those parts were very fun to discover but I won't spoil them here. My only sadness is that it is over....

I am a big David Mitchell fan since the first time I read Cloud Atlas. Admittedly, it usually takes me some time to get stuck into one of his books, but that just never happened for me here. Part of the problem is me. I've never been a fan of books centered around the music scene. But this also felt like some of the Mitchell magic was missing here. I'll still eagerly read his next book, and hopefully we'll love it as I do his others.

The blurb describes Utopia Avenue as “the strangest band you’ve never heard of”. I didn’t find the band all that strange. The four 20-something band members seemed pretty standard issue for a folk rock group of the 1960s. They had family problems and money issues. They were growing up and exploring their sexuality as they tried to create their music and get it heard. The guitarist also had serious mental problems. He was the most interesting character.

The author name drops a lot of musicians of that era, but that doesn’t make you feel like you were really there. In fact, I found it distracting and I would have preferred that the band not keep bumping into David Bowie or Jerry Garcia. I also would have preferred that the book be 200 pages shorter. The book held my interest, but I was hoping for more. 3.5 stars

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

Story of a 1960s folk-rock-psychedelic band, Utopia Avenue, from their formation to their reception in America as part of the “British Invasion.” The story follows the lives of the band members through ups and downs, big breaks, public appearances, tours, songwriting, family situations, and relationships.

The book is structured in the format of an album, with each chapter related to a particular song. The reader is privy to the featured band member’s thoughts, so we get to know each of them. One of the band members experiences mental health issues, and this particular storyline goes rather far afield. I am told Mitchell’s works tend to intersect, but this is only the second of his works I have read, so it occasionally left me scratching my head.

The story features cameo appearances by real people of the music scene, which lends a historical flavor, as do the referenced cultural events of the time (1967-1968). It ventures into the expected areas of “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.” It is well-written and entertaining. I normally do not care for epilogues, but I found this one exceptional.

Another superb novel by one of my top 5 contemporary authors. More accessible than his other novels and a pleasure to read, start to finish.

There’s so much energy in this book.as it covers the history of a band in the counter-culture 1960’s. There’s lots of beautifully colored prose to create a visual picture, but it didn’t pull me in. This is my generation, and despite all the name-dropping and cameo appearance of famous rock singers of the times I couldn’t really connect. Yes, Jerry Garcia is there, but right now I’m more enthralled with Cherry Garcia ice cream than this book.

Wonderfully refreshing and fun tale of the birth and rapid rise of a British folk-rock band in the interval of 1967-68. The characters are vivid and the portrayal of their trials and tribulations are moving and touching, their triumphs at various stages exhilarating. A guilty pleasure for me was all the cameo appearances and formative interactions with many famous musicians, such as Janis, Jimi, Bowie, Sandy Denny and Leonard Cohen. After a slow period of hard-knocks, the tale accelerates after their first successful recording and we get delightful interludes amid London’s Soho crown and, on an American tour, at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles, and the psychedelic San Francisco scene.

The band is born through the creative efforts of their manager Levon to bring musicians together, sort of like the puzzle of forging a fantasy baseball team. He makes the blend of a female folk singer and keyboardist named Elf, who of middle class background; Jasper, a Dutch-born rock guitarist of upper class origins; Dean, a blues-oriented bass player from working-class London; and Griff, a versatile, working class jazz drummer from Yorkshire. That the first three each compose their own songs and lyrics enhances their strengths in the same vein as the Beatles. My mind imagines a fusion of folk and rock such as that of “Fairport Convention” and “The Band.”

Different music reviewers marvel at their blend:
"Take a prime cut of Pink Floyd, add a dash of Cream, a pinch of Dusty Springfield, marinade overnight and whaddya get?...

What do you get when you cross an Angry Young Bassist, a folk-scene doyenne, a Stratocaster demigod, and a jazz drummer? Answer: Utopia Avenue, a band like no other."

I loved how Mitchell develops the separate characters as they work through their own personal demons, ambitious egos, and jealousies toward successes in fulfillment of their talent. They forge a provisional family and support each other in overcoming challenging family backgrounds, their initial low status and money prospects, and costly mistakes with drugs and sex or trust in the wrong people. Elf and manager Levon struggle with LGBT issues, Jasper with mental illness, Dean with delusion of grandeur and anger management, and Griff with alcohol abuse, but together they are resilient and keep each other afloat.

I was amazed how Mitchell made the paradoxes of the era come alive, such as the collision of widespread social commitment to political change and equally pervasive retreat into the alluring narcissism captured by the phrases “drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll” and “turn on, tune in, drop out”. We get to experience how it was that such great music was spawned between the time of the ‘Summer of Love’ and the dark days of relentless expansion of the Vietnam War, campus riots, and assassinations of heroes like Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Personally, music felt like a key to my survival then as at ages 16-17 I strove with attaining a sense of identity and some kind of agency in the confusing times.

I have read many books about the lives and times of artists and musicians, fiction and non-fiction, always seeking some clues to understanding the profound mysteries of the creative process. Always I have ended up disappointed or teased with little glimmers of elucidation amid much hand-waving over the magic. Mitchell comes the closest of all to believable revelations about how creative success emerges from the harnessing of talent to experience. As a good example, here is Elf working on a tune in the aftermath of the loss of a family member:

"Elf sits at a piano in a deserted function room at the Cricketer’s Arms and practices arpeggios. …Elf senses a melody is waiting. ‘Sometimes they find you, …but sometimes you track it like the lie of the land, by clues, by scent almost.’ … Elf draws a stave as a statement of intent. She settles on E flat minor—'such a cool scale’--with her right hand and plays harmonies and disharmonies with her left to see what sparks fly off. ‘Art is unbiddable; all you can do is signal your readiness.’ Wrong turns, eliminated, reveal the right path. ‘Like love.’
Elf carries on, linking rightness with the net rightness along. ‘Art is sideways. Art is diagonal.’ She tries flipping it, playing bass arpeggios with a treble overlay. ‘Art is tricks of the light’ She happens upon a middle section—'a glade in the forest, full of bluebells’--that she half identifies as, and half creates from “The Lord is My Shepherd”—played upside down. She reprises the opening themes at the end. ‘It’s changed by the middle. Like innocence changed by experience’. She plays with rubato, legato and dynamics. She runs through the whole thing. It works. ‘A few rough edges, sure, but …’ Nothing strained. Nothing naff. Nothing staid. No words. No title. No hurry, Not yet. She murmurs, “Bloody hell, you’re good.” ”

A local manager for their tour in Italy boils down the special contribution of each band member to their repertoire:
<i>Your songs, Elf, they say, ‘Life is sad, is joy, is emotion.’ Is universal. Jasper, your songs say, ‘Life is strange, is wonderful, is a dream.’ Who does not feel so, sometimes? Dean, your songs say, ‘Life is a battle, is hard, but you is not alone.’ You, Greef, you is a drummer <u>intuitivo</u>. </i>

The overall thrust of the narrative is toward realism. Yet, you can see the book gets tagged ‘science fiction’ on some lists. This is because there are many interludes with Jasper struggling with his mental illness, which feels to him like an odd form of possession, and we get some amazing breakthroughs into magical realism replete with characters from “The Bone Clocks” and “Slade House”. Fans of Mitchell are likely aware that he considers all of his work to be part of a single meta-novel. Thus, there is some extra pleasure here on progress toward that end and the illusion that everything is connected across history, as made most manifest in his marvelous “Cloud Atlas”. We are primed for such linkages by Jasper’s surname of “De Zoet” and the title of Mitchell’s novel set in 18th century Japan, “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet.” The fun for me of the appearance or references to various characters from his past novels resembles that of the hidden “Easter Eggs” one used to be able to uncover in many computer programs and games after providing the right combination of keystrokes.

This book was provided by the publisher for review through the Netgalley program.