RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Fascinating ... Impressive here is not just her evident mastery of her material, but also the skill with which she translates it to her audience ... Though Dunlop’s prose is lively and engaging for the most part, it is not unmarked by repetitiousness.
David Mitchell
PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... highly entertaining, but occasionally flawed ... Prominent in Utopia Avenue is the role of the aleatoric ... With the author’s focus on karmic returns and reincarnations, the chance decisions of a moment really do echo out into a vast and interconnected universe. As with many of Mitchell’s books, the story dips between detailed historical realism and outlandish science-fictional interventions ... We find moving and deftly handled chapters about domestic violence and Sudden infant death syndrome. But we also have a major narrative thread about the disembodied soul of a magical, centuries-old Japanese abbot and a secretive, immortal cabal called the Horologists. The feel of the novel is not unlike that of a Peter Blake collage ... Utopia Avenue runs into problems ... Useful for the new reader but, for the Mitchell fan, it means that the peak of an otherwise gripping arc is largely occupied by a five-page precis of a ten-year-old book—albeit with some important new facts revealed. Moreover, by committing so literally to the increasingly specific metaphysics of his fantastical world...the author robs it of some of its mysterious shimmer ... There is much to admire about Mitchell as a prose stylist, yet his dialogue too often veers into either the expositional or parodic. There is a fine line between a sharp observation and outright caricature ... Mitchell’s most obvious skill as a novelist is for the mechanics of storytelling—his talent is for plotting and narrative pacing, for holding the reader’s attention, building and releasing stress ... local infelicities in the individual books are easy enough to overlook.
Lars Iyer
MixedThe Times Literary SupplementThe novel covers ten weeks in the lives of...sixth-formers ... in lyrical and often moving passages. And at the same time, it is an affectionate satire on intellectual life and a certain sort of grand philosophical thinking ... Iyer’s prose is immersive, dominated by dialogue, and his plot is recursively repetitious (in the way that schooldays and revision are). The almost formless story is given order by precise time markers: the novel is broken down into weeks, each broken into days. Individual passages, read in isolation – with the friends’ meandering yet pugnacious ruminations, interspersed with bursts of sweary rudeness – form sharp, witty vignettes of bright teenagers grasping for meaning ... But with paragraph after paragraph of this stuff, chapter after chapter, it starts to feel relentless ... At times it shifts from the merely tedious to the almost insufferable.
