He was also attracted to recreating the late 1960s because for him this is when an album “became an art form.” Mitchell said that “nothing comes from nowhere, just like the novel” but he loved the idea that “you could curate songs and make a musical journey out of them.” After three or four sentences it becomes as intolerable as listening to someone else’s dreams.” However, he said he was drawn to the challenge of trying to “outwit the impossibility of the situation, using words to describe something that is non-textual.” Mitchell was well aware of the potential risk in writing a rock and roll novel: in an interview he admitted that “prose isn’t that good at describing music. This is a story about the convergence of disparate characters, but it is also fundamentally about music: the writing process, the recording dilemmas, the unpredictable live performances, the magical moment they first hear their song played on the radio.
The band is made up of the ethereal folk singer Elf Holloway, who is struggling to come to terms with her sexuality guitarist Jacob de Zoet, who is on the precipice of a mental breakdown flirtatious but fiery bassist Dean Moss, and down-to-earth Yorkshire drummer Griff Griffin. His ninth novel follows the fictional rock band Utopia Avenue, formed in Soho in 1967, and their bumpy rise to fame and fortune. Most of our musical lexicon stems from music theory, but when we want to describe the emotive power of music, then language seems to come up short.ĭavid Mitchell’s latest novel, Utopia Avenue, was therefore somewhat of a risk. There is an unattributed maxim that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” If music is indeed a language in itself, then something seems to be lost in translation it is almost like there is this intangible, quintessential je-ne-sais-quoi about music that words can never do justice to. However, despite the many attempts, there seems to be a sense that his unnamed genre is still fundamentally problematic for writers. Forster’s Howards End contains a lengthy description of a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, while Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time includes a fictional violin sonata. Strangely, there seems to be no such verbal equivalent for writing about music, despite numerous examples: Zadie Smith’s Swing Time focuses on two girls bonded by their love of tap dancing, while Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes tells the stories of five musicians. There are many examples in literature: Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, Keats’ ‘Ode On A Grecian Urn’, the Iliad by Homer.
Ekphrasis is defined as a literary description or commentary on a work of art.
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