The reasons for this are no doubt complex. Even setting aside Frank Zappa’s apocryphal canard about writing about music being like dancing about architecture, it’s easy to see how the ludicrous self-importance of rock stars and the excess and absurdity of the music world might quickly tip into parody in fiction. Likewise, it’s clearly difficult to imagine characters and music that feel real when real music is so deeply embedded in our consciousnesses. No less importantly, the sorts of stories about the loss of innocence, addiction, and doomed brilliance that the music world offers often veer into deeply clichéd territory.

David Mitchell’s new novel, Utopia Avenue, plays a curious game with many of these challenges, simultaneously inhabiting and acknowledging a host of rock and roll clichés, and casting a warmly amused eye at the lunacy of rock and roll in all its pomp and circumstance while retaining a measure of distance. It is also, as is often the case with Mitchell, essentially a conjuring trick, an exercise in misdirection in which the novel’s true concerns are hidden in plain sight.

David Mitchell (photograph by Paul Stuart/Hachette)

Set against the backdrop of the late 1960s, the novel imagines the rise and fall of the greatest band you’ve never heard of, Utopia Avenue. Unusually for a successful band, Utopia Avenue is not the result of a chance teenage encounter at a church fête or on the platform of Dartford train station. Instead, it is assembled, Frankenstein-style, by manager Levon Frankland out of individuals he believes are wasted in their current bands.

The main characters form a curious and seemingly incompatible quartet. Up front, there’s bassist and singer Dean Moss, a rough working-class kid damaged by the loss of his mother and his father’s descent into alcoholism, and Jasper de Zoet, the band’s stupendously gifted lead guitarist, who often seems to exist on another plane of reality. Alongside them there is Elf Holloway, formerly one half of a folk duo with womanising Australian bush balladeer Bruce Fletcher and blessed with a voice that can stop time. Behind them all there is drummer Peter ‘Griff’ Griffin, a Northerner whose no-nonsense manner disguises a surprisingly tender heart.

Despite their differences, the four complement one another, both personally and musically. After a shaky beginning they begin to find fame, if not fortune, moving from the fringes of the music scene to somewhere a few spots to the side of the centre. As they do, they are forced to come to terms with their various demons. In Dean’s case, these relate mostly to his compulsive use of sex and drugs and to issues with his father that follow. For comfortably middle-classed Elf, they involve family expectations, the ongoing problem of the awful Bruce (whose worst crime is surely using ‘Wombat’ as a term of affection), and, behind it all, the issue of her sexuality. Meanwhile Jasper – seemingly the most unflappable of the four – is grappling with a malefic presence he calls ‘Knock-Knock’, which has insinuated itself into his mind.

Although the band’s personal struggles occupy quite a bit of the novel, they never seem particularly urgent. At one level this isn’t surprising: extremity and self-destructiveness aren’t really Mitchell’s natural register. But they also provide the framework for a veritable blizzard of references and in-jokes, as famous and not-so-famous names from Rick Wakeman and John Martyn to Syd Barrett and John Lennon wander in and out. Hurrying into a lift in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, Elf finds herself beside an impecunious Leonard Cohen, who tries out the line about being Jim Morrison that led to his tryst with Janis Joplin and inspired ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’. David Bowie appears twice: the first time, in a nod to ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ and its play on Edward Lear, on a staircase in Soho, where he introduces himself to Jasper as an ‘artiste-at large’ and tells them about the single he is about to release; the second at a party where he laments his failing career (‘My singles got no airplay. My label didn’t promote the album … I’ve been the Next Big Thing since I left school, but I’m still broke’). Even Mick Jagger makes an appearance, pulling Dean out of the way at a protest that has descended into violence. ‘Mick Jagger?’ Dean asks. ‘Nah, I’m an impersonator. Go thataway, this ain’t no place for a street fighting man.’

At their best, these in-jokes are delicious; at other times, as the ‘Street Fighting Man’ gag attests, they are groanworthy. Writing about – or in this case ventriloquising – real people is never easy, and with figures like Bowie and Cohen it’s doubly difficult because not only are their voices intensely familiar but their music also sets up an intimacy that, while illusory, powerfully resists this sort of imitation.

This problem is compounded by the fact that, despite its subject and the welter of period detail, the book isn’t particularly interested in either music or the historical moment it inhabits, and so has surprisingly little to say about either. Instead, it is playing a quite different, more metaphysical game.

The first indication of this lies in the story of Jasper and his spiritual nemesis, Knock-Knock, whose eventual exorcism reveals not just the connections between Utopia Avenue and Mitchell’s 2010 novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but also presents another chapter in the battle between the Anchorites and the Horologists that lay behind his 2014 novel, The Bone Clocks.

Of course, it’s no secret that Mitchell’s oeuvre operates not as a sequence of individual novels but as interlocking pieces in a vast metanarrative that stretches into both the deep past and the deep future. Indeed, one of the pleasures for long-time readers is the flash of recognition as characters reappear and connections are revealed. Yet in Utopia Avenue this process of connection is actually the point; it’s no coincidence that when asked to describe the band’s musical style, Jasper says, ‘Pavonine … Magpie-minded. Subterranean.’ For in an echo of critic Greil Marcus’s argument that ‘rock ‘n’ roll may be more than anything a continuum of associations, a drama of direct and spectral connections between songs and performers. It may be a story about the way a song will continue speaking in a radically different setting from the one that, it seemed, gave rise to it, a story in which someone may own the copyright but the voice of the song is under no one’s control’, Mitchell seems to be suggesting that history itself is almost alive, a glittering web that connects us all not just to one another but to time itself. It is a vision at once transcendent and humane, shimmering yet redemptive. Like Mitchell’s imaginative world. Or music.