![]() ![]() Pepper’ s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the first time, and Levon marvels, “ Wow. Songs often follow narratives, and albums sometimes do in one scene, the members of Utopia Avenue listen to Sgt. This makes for a highly schematic structure that doesn’t do the novel any favors. Elf, Dean, and Jasper write most of the tracks, so most of the chapters are told from the point of view of one of these three, but Griff and Levon provide the lyrics for one song apiece and get chapters accordingly. Each chapter takes the title of a song and recounts the events that inspired that song. Each of the novel’s six parts represents one side of the band’s three LP records. ![]() It ends in San Francisco during the autumn of ’68 with a tragic but utterly random catastrophe. ![]() ![]() The band begins in London, as a musical blind date engineered by Levon Frankland (himself from The Bone Clocks), who is here a nattily dressed Canadian clearly modeled on Beatles manager Brian Epstein. The overarching plot of Utopia Avenue is one long climb. An irony of Mitchell’s work is that the more overtly he strives for fantasy, the less magical his fiction becomes. ![]()
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