The Sixties vibe: Utopia Avenue, by David Mitchell, reviewed

There aren’t many authors as generous to their readers as David Mitchell. Ever since Ghostwritten in 1999, he’s specialised in big novels bursting with storytelling in all kinds of genres — most famously Cloud Atlas, where six very different novellas were immaculately intertwined. Not only that but, as he’s said, ‘each of my books is one chapter in a sort of sprawling macro-novel’, with many of the same characters and events being either updated or given fuller backstories.

At its best, this generosity has resulted in some of the most lavishly satisfying fiction of recent times. Occasionally, though, it can feel rather like the type shown by Mrs Doyle in Father Ted, with Mitchell refusing to take no for an answer as he forces more and more would-be treats on his already sated readers.

In 2014’s The Bone Clocks, for example, Mitchell’s strange fondness for the transmigration of souls as a narrative device was given a backstory of particularly punishing and increasingly silly thoroughness. The climax came in a full-scale showdown between two kinds of immortal beings: the virtuous Horologists, who achieve immortality by means of their souls entering and reanimating naturally deceased children, and the villainous Anchorites — who achieve it by killing ‘engifted’ children and drinking their souls. (Sample sentence from the showdown: ‘Incorporeally, I pour psychovoltage into a neurobolas and kinetic it at our assailants.’) Worse still, The Bone Clocks was swiftly followed by Slade House in which the Anchorite-Horologist struggle was explained even more painstakingly.

Which is why Utopia Avenue, Mitchell’s first novel since then, comes as a such a relief. True, it does feature one soul that’s migrated enough to require Horologist intervention — and possibly to baffle anyone who hasn’t read his previous fiction. But happily this is only one element in a book bristling with pleasures from the more traditional side of his palette.