The same could be said for the cameos by stars of the period who turn up with unlikely regularity. It’s what people expect from Mitchell, these little postmodern self-referential flourishes, but here, more than ever before, they feel by-the-numbers, empty of meaning or grander purpose. Aficionados will recognise that Levon appears in The Bone Clocks while Jasper is obsessed with a piece of music called The Cloud Atlas Sextet. The book opens in early January 1967 (we know this because DONALD CAMPBELL DEAD is plastered across the newspaper billboards) and ends in tragedy in 1968, but in just a little over the year, Mitchell does his best to squeeze in every hackneyed cultural reference going, as well as a host of coy nods to his own work. Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, ‘lost in a drug-induced trance’, has a cameo in Utopia Avenue. Jasper is on guitar, a quiet, troubled, intense young man. Anarchic, sweary, likes a drink” “Elf” (Elizabeth) Holloway, the singer, has recently separated from her musical and romantic partner, a laddish Australian, and is primly middle class finally, there’s Jasper de Zoet (yes, a relative of Jacob de Zoet, the title character of Mitchell’s 2010 novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet – and living off a Dutch East Indian legacy). Dean Moss, on bass, is a heart-throb from Gravesend who speaks in a grating cockney pastiche Peter “Griff” Griffin, the drummer is “a northern diamond in the rough. The novel is arranged into three separate “albums” – Paradise Is the Road to Paradise, The Stuff of Life and The Third Planet, with each “track” written from the perspective of a different member of the band (or, on one occasion, the band’s manager, Levon Franklin).

So we come to his latest, the hefty Utopia Avenue, which is the story of the rise and fall of a rock band in the late 1960s. I’ve carried on reading him dutifully since, but nothing has come close to the heights of Cloud Atlas, and each new novel is met with a mixture of hope and the sense that he’d pulled a fast one on me with the glory of his one-hit wonder. I devoured his other novels and waited eagerly for new work. I was in my early 20s when it came out and remember pressing it on everyone I knew.

It was a gloriously inventive mind-storm of a novel, leaping wildly through time and space, seemingly unconstrained by the narrative gravity that pins other books to the ground. I may never forgive David Mitchell for writing Cloud Atlas.

Utopia avenue mitchell