The stammering protagonist in Black Swan Green, he has a much thornier and more intricate relationship with language than anyone around him would guess, unless they’re a speech therapist or close family member. “But yes, you do identify a cluster of my characters who have this atypical relationship with language. If we’re more in control of fates as adults then we get to write that map, and if we have some neurotypical apps that sift the recent past, present and future for us, then we are instantly excused that Doctor Who/lost-in-space-and-time disorientation that I think many autistic people live with, which makes them heroes, because if we were somehow transplanted into their nightmare, we’d probably be sectioned by half past five this afternoon. We all have and need a map of the recent past, present and future. He does like to know what’ll be happening in the next few days, but it doesn’t have to be the same sequence of events that happened in the last few days. As it happens, my son is not at all routine dependent. “There is, as you will know, a plethora of autisms. “Autism is one of those words that should be talked about in the plural, like intelligence,” he responds. This isn't a poor-me thing: I now view my stammer as a strange kind of gift He’s also father to an autistic boy, which, I suggest, must have been difficult during lockdown.
Mitchell himself has had a complicated relationship with speech and language, having stammered since childhood. Jasper, somewhere between Syd Barrett and Jimmy Page, is your classic Mitchell character: non-verbal, somewhat dissociative, an outsider. Utopia Avenue’s prodigious but troubled lead guitarist Jasper de Zoet is plagued with a form of ancestral possession that presents as incipient schizophrenia. “My American publicist got an inquiry from someone in the media that made me happier than perhaps any other piece of feedback I’ve heard about the book, which was, ‘Sorry if this is a silly question, but was the band actually real?’”įor all the Cameron Crowe I’m-a-believer fervour though, there are darker elements manifest in the new novel. “They have to be fractious enough to not feel like some weird agreement cult, but not so dysfunctional that it becomes implausible that they’d spend any time in each other’s company,” Mitchell considers, speaking by Zoom from his West Cork home. What Mitchell’s book nails is a sense of a band as a surrogate family, with all the love and dysfunction we normally associate with sibling relationships. Rock biopics and novels tend to over-egg conflict as drama: the power grabs and internecine arguments between musicians, romantic partners, management and fans. Fortuitously, his new novel Utopia Avenue offers precisely the kind of escapism required by the present moment, being a rock ‘n’ roll fable set in late 1960s London, a time of considerable social turbulence but also Aquarian optimism. David Mitchell, British-born author of ambitious, expansive novels like Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Bone Clocks, might have a taste for the speculative (he’s recently worked on Lana Wachowski’s Sense8 and the forthcoming Matrix 4), but even he admits that now might not be the best time for dark Ballardian visions.
We’ve officially pressed pause on the dystopian.
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