One thing is for certain: this book is a labour of love, constructed with the fierce attention to detail that distinguishes all of Mitchell’s work. There will be Mitchellians far better equipped than I am for such a game, and in any case, it doesn’t get us any nearer to assessing Utopia Avenue as a novel in its own right. But I’m not going to give in to to this temptation, at least not any more. Here’s Dr Marinus, found in The Thousand Autumns and The Bone Clocks too and Luisa Rey, last seen in Cloud Atlas from 2004. The band’s bassist, Dean Moss, shares a Gravesend childhood with Holly Sykes of The Bone Clocks, Mitchell’s last novel, which appeared in 2014. Let’s start by noting that the lead guitarist in the eponymous band of this capacious new book is one Jasper de Zoet it doesn’t take a horologist to discern the link to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, published in 2010. These web pages are a delightfully spoddy assessment of the ways in which Mitchell’s novels – he has called the whole project his “über-novel” – can be linked one to another. The temptation, in reviewing a new novel by David Mitchell, is to approach the process along the lines of the “David Mitchell Universe Wikia”.
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