Mitchell at Book Forum

I reviewed the newest David Mitchell at Bookforum, and had a bit to say about the Mitchellverse along the way.

I had a section in this that I cut that was about the way Mitchell’s abiding obsession with the decline of British global might unifies his body of work. I have to give it a bit more thought, but I think the evidence of this in Utopia Avenue is mainly in the Dean plot.

Here is a paragraph I cut from that review, but which I’d like to revisit some more:

The driving motive in Mitchell’s body of work is a fear of being rooted out and destroyed, either physically or mentally : by the people in power, by people who hate you for what you are, by yourself for not being what you expected to be. Mitchell ties this dread to the crumbling failures of the end of British global might. In the character of Dean Moss, for example, Utopia Avenue’s bassist we see the tension between lower class ambition and upper class disdain: there might be a small vignette in Dean’s hot fury at being found wanting that presages Thatcherism, Brexit, and hateful nationalisms of all stripes. Mitchell explores a ferreting, burrowing impulse in British existence when life is made cheaper and more expendable, when the recognition of the horror of empire suddenly dawns on the people living within Britain’s borders, when culpability mingles with resentment to form a fomenting stew of anxiety and complaint.

The other thing that has been occupying me is reading Agatha Christie novels. I have now moved on to the Tommy and Tuppance novels, and boy, are they little exercises in the literary mode of detective fiction! Now I have to read Edgar Wallace, I guess. Crap.