One of the rarely-mentioned pleasures of reading period fiction lies in spotting those little anachronisms – a striking clock in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar most famously – that have crept undetected into the text, leaving you with a self-congratulatory smugness that makes you feel briefly superior to the writer of the book in question.
David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue, I felt, would offer rich anachronistic pickings. It’s a novel about a 1960s rock group based in London, with walk-on parts for the likes of Brian Jones, Syd Barrett, Steve Marriott, Keith Moon, Hendrix, Bowie, Lennon and a host of others. This was my era after all and my town: I was born and raised in East London – the Tremeloes’ manager lived in our street and you would sometimes see their van with the name emblazoned on the side parked outside his house – with older siblings who bought all the latest releases (singles, EPs, LPs) and filled the house with the music of the day. With satisfying neatness, I became a teenager in the Summer of Love.
What could Mitchell offer in return? Born in Lancashire in 1969, he could hardly have experienced the shock and awe of listening to Sergeant Pepper’s for the first time in the year of its release or the furtive thrill of sneaking into his sister’s tiny boxroom when she was out so he could play the Zombies’ ‘She’s Not There’ on her Dansette record player. My brother and I even recorded ourselves pretending to be radio DJs and introducing our own Top Ten singles to an imaginary audience on our dad’s reel-to-reel tape recorder.
But, somewhat disappointingly, I found that Mitchell had done his homework. In fact it turned out he knew far more about the 1960s music scene than I ever knew or was likely to know, despite his being a babe-in-arms in Stockport at a time when I was attending my first ever weekend rock festival (The Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music) on the weekend of my 16th birthday in 1970.
In fact I found only two anachronisms in all 561 pages of Utopia Avenue, neither of which was music-related. At one point in 1967 a trucker in a transport cafe is described as reading the Racing Post, which was only launched in the 1980s. A horse-racing aficionado of the day would have been reading the Sporting Life. And elsewhere the word ‘clone’ is used in its modern figurative sense at a time when even the literal sense of the term was rare and confined to a technical context.
On a related subject, an article by Ben Yagoda lists ‘lexical anatopisms’ in the book – anatopism being ‘the equivalent of anachronism, except referring to words out of place rather than words out of time’ – where American characters use Anglicisms such as ‘chalk and cheese’, ‘spot on’ and ‘chop chop’. A corresponding form of anatopism – British characters using Americanisms – occurs with the members of Utopia Avenue routinely referring to marijuana as ‘weed’ when in Britain at the time it was usually called ‘grass’.
Occasionally, too, there’s a sense of boxes being ticked, a checklist of personalities and locations and legendary rock trivia, as when keyboardist Elf meets Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin and Jackson Browne at New York’s Chelsea Hotel and we hear about Dylan writing ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ while staying there. And sometimes the detailed technical analysis of the band’s musical compositions, which will mean little to the musically-untrained reader, looks a bit like showing off.
But these are minor quibbles. And, though it pains me to say it, I thoroughly enjoyed Utopia Avenue. Mitchell’s breadth of knowledge about all sorts of obscure and esoteric subjects is truly impressive and the precision of his prose and freshness of his imagery are almost Nabokovian in quality. Utopia Avenue stands alongside the best of his books and is certainly among the most straightforward, even allowing for the weirdness of the psychotic episodes afflicting lead guitarist Jasper de Zoet and Mitchell’s habit of having his own characters or their descendants migrate from one book to another. In short, it’s hard to imagine a better novel about the British music scene of the 1960s and its social and cultural impact ever being written. Damn! And I so wanted to be disappointed!
Robert Grossmith 