![]() ![]() He interviewed musicians, and read roughly a dozen memoirs by survivors of the era and absorbed details “like harvesting plankton,” he says. Mitchell has no background in music, but began learning guitar and piano while writing the book to lend authenticity to scenes where the characters try out new chord sequences and piece together songs. “You could disassemble the flawed or repressive structures of the old world and replace them with something more just and more equitable.” Music, he adds, was the “medium of transmission.”Ībove all, it’s a book about music–a fly-on-the-wall look at the realities of making a living from it, but also the process of writing and rehearsing songs. The germ for the novel was his love of the music of this era, Mitchell says–bands like Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention and the Grateful Dead that shunned conformity and found “new ways of putting a song together that hadn’t really been done before.” But he was also fascinated by these years as a pivot point, a time when the 1960s reached “a critical kind of ideological mass, where enough people thought that society was rebootable,” he says. In my experience, pain and poverty and failure isn’t really very good for the writing life.” ![]() “So reading this it makes me feel fortunate that I have a. “Some measure of success is actually the greatest enabler,” he says. Reading about the painter’s struggles put his own life as an artist in perspective. He jokes about his reputation as an introvert–of life stuck in lockdown, he says, “Yeah, but what else is new?”–and excitedly shows me his current reading material, a lavishly illustrated collection of Vincent van Gogh’s letters. Speaking via video chat from the cottage in southwest Ireland where he has lived for 15 years, Mitchell is engaging and boyishly passionate about his latest interests. Mitchell’s obsessions–beyond the fictional meta-universe he has created–are with human voyages of self-actualization the process of figuring out who we are, and how we connect, in the brief time we have. Beneath the layers of references and unconventional structures lie lucid narratives. His sentences can be lyrical, but his prose is propulsive. His eight novels are experimental but approachable. ![]() Mitchell qualifies among their ranks twice short-listed for the Booker Prize, his work has been compared to that of Haruki Murakami, Thomas Pynchon and Anthony Burgess. Few, though, seem to pay as much attention when Ian McEwan or Margaret Atwood does it. We all hit the speed bump of reductivism.” It’s the price he accepts for his interest in “hybridizing genre,” he says. It’s not just within art, it’s what kind of person you are. So, I ask the novelist over a recent video call, Are you a platypus? The 51-year-old chuckles. It’s hard not to read this as a wink at Mitchell’s own reputation for genre fluidity, given a body of work that encompasses historical fiction ( The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), bildungsroman ( Black Swan Green), science fiction ( The Bone Clocks) and a combination of the above ( Cloud Atlas, for which he is best known). “You’re like a zoologist asking a platypus, ‘Are you a ducklike otter? Or an otter-like duck?'” replies Jasper, the group’s virtuosic guitar player. In David Mitchell’s new novel, Utopia Avenue, a member of the 1960s psychedelic folk rock band that gives the book its name is asked by an interviewer which category its eclectic music falls into. ![]()
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