In the meantime, he blends two more standard kinds of novels: historical fiction and a rock band book. But Mitchell defers the unfolding of an intra-novel, inter-dimensional, trans-temporal war for human souls to the novel’s closing sequence. This all takes place in the first 15 rollicking pages of a 600-page story, and Mitchell is signaling, by way of the guitarist’s name, that what we’re about to read is linked somehow to his previous writings, including his historical novel about a Dutchman’s experiences in 18th-century Japan, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. “Who is he?” “His name’s Jasper de Zoet.” Levon is a music producer who likes Dean’s music and invites him along to a nightclub to hear a virtuoso guitarist play psychedelic covers of Mississippi blues standards. Amping up the already-high Dickensian mode, Dean flips his last coin to decide what to do next the coin disappears down a gutter, and a mysterious stranger appears.
He wields his bass guitar as a final attempt to make it as a musician in late 1960s London. He is soon bruised, jobless and homeless. A bewhiskered stockbroker type in a bowler hat smirks at the long-haired lout’s misfortune, and is gone.” Dean heads off again, only to be pickpocketed on his way to pay the rent to his merciless landlady before begging in vain for a pay advance from his boss, a miserly Italian restaurant owner. He slips and falls on black ice: “ Bloody London.
The novel begins with a young man, Dean, rushing down a busy street. That said, there is another, darker story here that (depending on how you feel about Mitchell’s overall body of work) either threatens or promises to be the primary source of the book’s considerable, if diffusive, energies and ambitions. Its particular areas of interest and treatment-recent North Atlantic history and culture, celebrity and politics, 1960s historical figures and a briefly famous rock band-are related to music-making. Mitchell’s latest, Utopia Avenue, is at first glance a maximally detailed historical novel.
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