The sense of supernatural threat, of being pursued, for mysterious reasons, across time, as part of a conflict too large for individual lifetimes to contain: this is the novel’s reality, even as the characters (apart from Jasper) are oblivious of it. Jasper’s suffering, his visions and auditory 'hallucinations'-tragically, pathologically insubstantial to the other characters within the realistic landscape of the book-are, to the initiated reader, quite real, more real than the various historical genre trappings, such as Carnaby Street, or the Chelsea Hotel, or zombie David Bowie. What it all amounts to is that Utopia Avenue exists on two different planes.
To go further would be to give too much away-not to everyone, perhaps, but certainly to readers of Mitchell’s earlier work. Not unlike Jasper himself, Utopia Avenue turns out to have been a sort of host for something else entirely. He proposes instead that nothing could be more natural, or in fact more commendable, than acting on the old and common longing to be heard above the crowd, even- perhaps particularly-at the cost of security and sanity. Mitchell does not castigate or punish Utopia Avenue for their yearning after lights and adulation: he is kinder and more wise. The book is most alive and most compelling when Mitchell slips the surly bonds of the realist premise and lands in his own extraordinary imagined worlds. At times, the frictionless quality of the prose extends to the story itself, so that it is possible to read for several pages at a time without quite feeling that events and characters have landed on the consciousness. It is enlivened by an attentive eye for the particulars.
The novel’s prose is for the most part consciously easeful and frictionless: it is a supremely readable novel, if the quality of readability is taken to be one which is difficult to achieve and a relief to encounter. Mitchell is evidently enthralled by both the romance and the practicality of music. The reader is impelled from the first by a kind of rushing, gleeful energy. Mitchell is expert at excavating the seams of loss, ambition and mere chance that lie under the edifice of fame.
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