https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/19/utopia-avenue-by-david-mitchell-review-endless-prog-rock-noodling

The acclaimed author of Cloud Atlas hits a bum note with this hackneyed story of a band in the late 1960s

I may never forgive David Mitchell for writing Cloud Atlas. It was a gloriously inventive mind-storm of a novel, leaping wildly through time and space, seemingly unconstrained by the narrative gravity that pins other books to the ground. I was in my early 20s when it came out and remember pressing it on everyone I knew. I devoured his other novels and waited eagerly for new work. I’ve carried on reading him dutifully since, but nothing has come close to the heights of Cloud Atlas, and each new novel is met with a mixture of hope and the sense that he’d pulled a fast one on me with the glory of his one-hit wonder.

So we come to his latest, the hefty Utopia Avenue, which is the story of the rise and fall of a rock band in the late 1960s. The novel is arranged into three separate “albums” – Paradise Is the Road to Paradise, The Stuff of Life and The Third Planet, with each “track” written from the perspective of a different member of the band (or, on one occasion, the band’s manager, Levon Franklin). Dean Moss, on bass, is a heart-throb from Gravesend who speaks in a grating cockney pastiche; Peter “Griff” Griffin, the drummer is “a northern diamond in the rough. Anarchic, sweary, likes a drink”; “Elf” (Elizabeth) Holloway, the singer, has recently separated from her musical and romantic partner, a laddish Australian, and is primly middle class; finally, there’s Jasper de Zoet (yes, a relative of Jacob de Zoet, the title character of Mitchell’s 2010 novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet – and living off a Dutch East Indian legacy). Jasper is on guitar, a quiet, troubled, intense young man.