It's certainly a plausible account, except perhaps in its rather sunny view of how intraband dynamics play out. Mitchell's many fans, and the many more fans of rock's adolescent years as a genre, will enjoy Utopia Avenue.

Having only read Cloud Atlas among Mitchell's several previous novels, I may have missed some references to the rest of his oeuvre.but it was hard to miss the references to Cloud Atlas and another of his books, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Each chapter is a more or less self-contained vignette centering on one of the band members, flashing back and forth in time to create suspense and develop character. Mitchell doesn't carry that, or any, conceit too far in a book that makes for a pleasant read if not a page-turner. The novel's organized into chapters corresponding to the songs on the six sides of Utopia Avenue's three albums. (Jasper greets him with, 'You're you, aren't you?'.which Lennon actually probably did get a lot.) Implausibly, Jim Morrison shows up but doesn't puke or punch anyone. Inevitably, the band end up at the Chelsea Hotel partying with Cohen and Janis Joplin. Brian Jones kvetches about never getting songwriting credit in the Stones, Sandy Denny lends the band's singer Elf (an appropriately twee abbreviation of Elizabeth Frances) some moral support, and bassist Dean takes a strange trip with Jerry Garcia in San Francisco. The members of Utopia Avenue meet Barrett and Bowie, among the many real-life legends who populate the book's 574 pages.

What if a jazz-loving drummer, a fiery rock guitarist, and a (relatively) seasoned bassist joined up with a folk singer-songwriter? One can very plausibly imagine a band like Utopia Avenue flourishing at a time when David Bowie was releasing songs about gnomes and Pink Floyd were still fronted by Syd Barrett. It opens in London in 1967, as a band discover musical alchemy amidst other artists who are feeling similarly adventurous. Utopia Avenue reads as a love letter, but not an uncritical one, to a place and time in popular culture. Surely there are hundreds of songs out there that Leonard Cohen admired but you haven't heard.let's just say 'Mona Lisa Sings the Blues' is one of them. The benefit of that approach is that you can posit a song that, say, Leonard Cohen would compliment - as the fictionalized version of him does in the case of a number by the eponymous quartet in David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue ( buy now) - and you can leave it at that. Of course, that doesn't prevent a fiction writer from taking the That Thing You Do! route and coming up with some music, but it's most typical for writers to leave the music to readers' imaginations. Writers of books and stories about fictional musicians, though, face a special challenge: the music itself, the lure that usually draws us in to stories about musicians, doesn't exist. Outside of books I read for this feature, about half of what I read is fiction.

I ask that question not out of any disdain for fiction as a genre - far from it.

Utopia band membr