In that debut and subsequent books - notably “Number9Dream” (2001) and the cult favorite “Cloud Atlas” (2004) - Mitchell spun remarkably intricate stories whose elements were ingeniously connected, like links in a chain, through time and space. “Filling hefty novels with chains of events” is certainly one way to describe what Mitchell has been up to since his remarkable first book, “Ghostwritten,” came out in 1999. The self-referential winking is not at all atypical. The joke here - one that will be immediately obvious to Mitchell’s fans - is that a number of these events have already filled a hefty novel: Mitchell’s own “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” a work of historical fiction enhanced with supernatural elements, published in 2010.

We see Jasper’s boarding school days in the 1950s melting into his infancy his father’s wedding in the 1930s segueing into the elder de Zoet’s childhood adventures with a kite scenes from the Boer War (“a bloody, stupid mess”) dissolving into images of horse-drawn carriages then colonial plantations in Java, Dutch East India Company ships sailing into Japanese waters finally a trading post, a monastery, a room filled with corpses. In a psychedelic moment toward the end of David Mitchell’s new novel, “Utopia Avenue,” which is about the birth, rise and demise of a British rock band in the 1960s, the long and lurid family history of one of the band members - a preternaturally talented, half-British, half-Dutch guitarist named Jasper de Zoet - unspools, filmlike, before his astonished eyes, all the way back to the late 18th century as it does so, another character murmurs that “the chain of events would fill a hefty novel.” Indeed.

Mitchell utopia avenue