easter eggs

FaceBook served me up a Memory this morning, from this day last year. I usually don't pay too much attention to these Memories, but this one is pertinent because it was the cover image of Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell, and I'm currently reading this very book, so it's something of a coincidence it should appear. I can see in the post that I was very excited by the thought of its publication, and the excitement has proven justified.

I am loving the book. It's the best book on music and being in a band that I've ever read. Utopia Avenue is the band's name. They are British, and struggling to make it on the 60s music scene. Mark Bolan, David Bowie, and Brian Jones make cameo appearances as do Alan Ginsberg, Sandy Denny, Keith Moon and many others. I thought Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid, about a 70s American band, was a good read but this knocks that into a cocked hat. What it's also really good at, and this shouldn't be surprising coming from an author of this quality, is its investigation of the creative process of writing, both music and lyrics, it offers a fascinating deep dive into the creative mind at work. Oh, and it also has sex. And drugs. And rock 'n' roll. And mental illness.

One thing I love about Mitchell's work is the clever way he reuses character names throughout his work, though there is always more to it than just recycling a name. Sometimes it's upfront and obvious, and sometimes it's really subtle, and you have to be alert for it. In this book, the band's guitarist is Jasper de Zoet, he's a Dutchman. In 2010, Mitchell published The Thousand Autums of Jacob de Zoet, about a Dutch clerk working for the Dutch East Indies Company in Japan in 1799. Another character in that book was a doctor named Marinus, and a psychiatrist called Marinus is referenced in Utopia Avenue too. There was also a character of this name in Mitchell's The Bone Clocks (2014), that Marinus is a being who has reincarnated into many bodies. Perhaps the author's most famous book is Cloud Atlas. It was made into a movie starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. In that book a character by the name of Robert Frobisher (played by Ben Whishaw in the film) writes a piece of music called the Cloud Atlas Sextet, and Jasper de Zoet listens to a recording of it in this book. There are many more examples of this in Mitchell's work, in games and movies they'd be called Easter eggs, and there are websites that track all the occasions and instances across all of his books.

I love David Mitchell's work. He is one of only two authors whose every book I buy, and inhale, the other being Sarah Waters (since you asked).