- There are many fans of UK author David Mitchell's novels, and I am one of them.
- His latest is a magnificent paean to sixties rock. It's absorbing from the start. It captures the character of Soho in the late sixties and its bars, clubs, cafes, music and art venues perfectly, and brings them stunningly alive. Though more than that is going on. There’s a revolution in play - throughout the whole of society and across the world. A new world is emerging. Not just in music and the arts, but in politics and society across the board. Mitchell shoves us into all of it.
- His trademark vivid prose is rich, colourful, swashbuckling, earthy and real. We are introduced to the new band Utopia Avenue. Four brilliant musicians and songwriters have been carefully selected by an ambitious but talented manager. Elf is on the piano, Griff on the drums, Dean on the bass, and Jasper on the lead guitar. And Elf is a woman, highly unusual in those times.
- These characters are brought stunningly to life in every detail, including their cockney accents. We gradually get their class-based and mostly harsh, ugly backstories. They’re intensely interesting and very likeable. We relate to them - their long hair, Carnaby Street fashion, transient relationships, sexual identities, drugs, constant money problems, and cruel, reactionary, conservative, and angry post-war parents upset by the emerging and disruptive counter-culture and its new consciousness. And unlike in Bone Clocks, Mitchell’s least successful novel in my opinion, their stories are fully integrated into a seamless whole. There are little side trips (Dean’s three days in a filthy cell in Rome; Elf’s nephew’s cot death) but they enrich rather than detract from the larger narrative. And, as is usual for Mitchell, characters in his previous books make brief appearances in this one.
- The conversations and arguments are electric and brimming with vitality. He writes about the musical structure of the songs like a seasoned critic and brings to life the concerts and performances. He's on stage with the band, utterly blown away by their brilliance. (If only we could be thrust forward 50 years to link to the music and hear the songs. We ache for it).
- As a writer, Mitchell has another dimension. I’ve never been an enthusiastic fan of his off-ramp excursions into otherworldly realms that too frequently complicate and bog down his core narrative. But at least he’s more restrained here. Jasper’s ‘Knock Knock’, an incorporeal spirit hounding him from his centuries old Dutch ancestry and ultimately hijacking his body, thrusts us back to Mitchell's previous, and quite superb novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Here it works.
- Real stars get brief appearances - David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Syd Barrett, Allen Ginsberg, Keith Moon, Brian Jones, John Lennon, Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, Jackson Browne, Jimi Hendrix, Mama Cass, Joni Mitchell, Graham Nash, Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia. There's endless parties and drugs. But is Mitchell indulging himself here: is this loose, sex and drugs, celebrity lifestyle the ideal and the one he would have preferred for himself? No matter.
- Towards the end of the novel we're forced to reflect on all this sixties stuff and find some deeper meaning. A journalist at a press conference asks the question 'Can songs change the world'? Forgive me for quoting the whole answer:
'Songs do not change the world', declares Jasper. 'People do. People pass laws, riot, hear God and act accordingly. People invent, kill, make babies, start wars'. Jasper lights a Marlboro. 'Which begs a question. "Who or what influences the minds of the people who change the world?" My answer is "Ideas and feelings". Which begs a question. "Where do ideas and feelings originate?" My answer is, "Others. One's heart and mind. The press. The arts. Stories. Last, but not least, songs." Songs. Songs, like dandelion seeds, billowing across space and time. Who knows where they'll land? Or what they'll bring?" Jasper leans into the mic and, without a wisp of self-consciousness, sings a miscellany of single lines form nine or ten songs. Dean recognises, 'It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)', 'Strange Fruit' and 'The Trail of the Lonesome Pine'. Others, Dean can't identify, but the hard-boiled press pack look on. Nobody laughs, nobody scoffs. Cameras click. 'Where will these song-seeds land? It's the parable of the sower. Often, usually, they land on barren soil and don't take root. But sometimes, they land in a mind that is ready. Is fertile. What happens then? Feelings and ideas happen. Joy, solace, sympathy. Assurance. Cathartic sorrow. The idea that life could be, should be, better than this. An invitation to slip into somebody else's skin for a little while. If a song plants an idea or a feeling in a mind, it has already changed the world.'
And later on, Jerry Garcia muses:
'Every third or fourth generation is a generation of radicals, of revolutionaries. We, my friends, are the bottle-smashers. We release the genies. We run riot, get shot, get infiltrated, get bought off. We die, go bust, sell out to the man. Sure as eggs is eggs. But the genies we let loose stay loose. In the ears of the young the genies whisper what was unsayable. "Hey kids - there's nothing wrong with being gay." Or "What if war isn't a patriotism test, but really fucking dumb?" Or "Why do so few own so goddamn much?" In the short run not a lot seems to change. Those kids are nowhere near the levers of power. Not yet. But in the long run? Those whispers are the blueprints of the future'.
- The final chapter, Elf’s tribute, is simply beautiful.
- What a magnificent book this is. Extraordinary.
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