Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of Mr David Mitchell’s achievements. His debut novel, Ghostwritten, published in 1999, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. His follow-ups, 2001’s number9dream and 2004’s Cloud Atlas, were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2007, Time magazine ranked him number 16 in its 100 Most Influential People In The World (sandwiched between Mr John Mayer at number 15 and Ms Kate Moss at number 17).

Last year, Cloud Atlas made the top 10 in The Guardian’s 100 best books of the 21st century, coming in at a not too shabby number nine. And, if you’re an older millennial like me, odds are you’re pretty excited (ie, giddy) about the next instalment in The Matrix cinematic universe. Mr Mitchell cowrote that (with Ms Lana Wachowski and Mr Aleksandar Hemon). “Literary” and “rock star” don’t usually go together, but let’s call it how it is: Mr Mitchell is a literary rock star.

Seven weeks before his new novel, Utopia Avenue, is released, he is sitting at home, at the edge of Clonakilty in West Cork, Ireland, interviewing me over Skype. Yes, somehow, the interviewer has become the interviewee. He asks me how I pronounce my surname, so I repeat it three times for him and tell him it’s Taiwanese. “There’s a little bit of a person’s soul in their name and I really don’t want to botch it,” he says. “It’s a good day when I meet a new name and get a brief tutorial on how to do it properly.” He then proceeds to ask me about my childhood and my parents, and even manages to discover that I’m attempting to write fiction for the first time, but struggling given current circumstances.

So yes, Mr David Mitchell is as nice as his reputation says he is. Nicer, even. No rock-star ego here. He is wearing a striped T-shirt, hair longer and scruffier than in his press photos, thanks to lockdown life, no doubt, and speaks with both willingness and eloquence. I learn that he loves similes. At one point, he even describes his (self-identified) overtly trigger-happy approach to using simile in number9dream with a simile. “Like a young child baking a cake, they’ll be throwing on the hundreds and thousands, the little edible ball bearings, the gummy bears – it’s just a nightmare of confection,” he laughs. “Where’s the cake in here?”

Mr Mitchell takes it upon himself to counsel me through my writing problems, one of which concerns the received wisdom of rules. “This is art,” he says. “Of course, there are reasons some things work better than others, but innovation and originality are about internalising rules and evolving them, morphing them and occasionally outright breaking them. A world where you only conform to artistic rules wouldn’t be a very creative one.”

It’s an ethos he has written by ever since his debut novel was published 21 years ago. Over the course of eight books, Mr Mitchell’s writing style has evolved and, on some occasions, outright broken the rules. Space, time, genre, narrative – for him, these conventional boundaries don’t exist. “I really don’t want my novels to over-resemble each other,” he says. “I like the idea that if I can change myself as a storyteller, as a writer, to some degree, then simply by writing like myself each time, there’ll be space between the books.”

From The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet, a historical novel set on a Dutch trading post off the coast of Japan in the 18th century, to The Bone Clocks, a sprawling sci-fi story about a centuries-old battle between two groups of immortals, set between 1984 and 2043 and told from the viewpoint of five characters, the only things that tie his novels together are boundless imagination, a wildly ambitious approach to story structure and his singular ability as a stylist of dazzling prose. Well, those things and the fact he’s writing what he calls his “uber-novel”. Each of his novels forms a chapter of this epic work and occupies the same universe, one that is populated with new and recurring characters (or people related to them). It’s like a loose Marvel Cinematic Universe, except fans have dubbed it “the Mitchellverse”.

In Utopia Avenue, for example, which centres around the titular band born from London’s psychedelic scene, Jasper de Zoet is a virtuosic lead guitarist. His ancestor is Jacob de Zoet from The Thousand Autumns. And, as Jasper discovers, the name isn’t the only thing they share. While The Bone Clocks was the first of Mr Mitchell’s novels to start connecting dots in a revelatory way, with Utopia Avenue, it feels like he is starting to lean into the concept of his “uber-novel”. For the first time, I think, characters and elements from all his previous novels appear, some of whom affect the band more significantly than others.

A book about music was always in the background, he says. When he was working on The Thousand Autumns about 11 years ago, he would take notes from music books he was reading, filling three or four notebooks. But he didn’t start writing Utopia Avenue until about four years ago. Where does his love of music come from? “Oh, that’s deep stuff,” he says. “Where does anyone’s love of music come from?”

Utopia Avenue is everything you’d expect from a Mr David Mitchell novel. Among other things, it captures the free spirit and optimism of the era – sex, acid trips, rock ‘n’ roll and everything in between. And it features more cameos (of musical icons) than a Mr Wes Anderson film. But it also deals with issues Mr Mitchell hasn’t touched on before. Throughout the novel, the band’s singer and keyboard player, Elf Holloway, finds herself grappling with her sexuality, alongside issues of feminism.

As a straight, white male, Mr Mitchell clearly hasn’t had the same experiences as his character. The key to writing authentically, he says, is research. To put himself in Elf’s shoes, he read “with a toothcomb” biographies, memoirs and watched documentaries of female singers and musicians who had made it in that time period.

“Sixties utopian thinking also had a nasty sexist undercurrent, and I read a really good biography of Sandy Denny – it’s called I’ve Always Kept A Unicorn, which is a killer title.” He mentions a Ms Janis Joplin film, too. “You just learn from those and try do your best to understand the forces at work against you that women had to overcome.”

As for Elf’s sexual identity, it was “dead easy to do it glibly”. So, again, memoirs of those who had made the same journey were integral. “You try to handle all of that as respectfully as you can, write a hideous, sloppy, messy first draft and slowly fix it and patch it up and make it better,” says Mr Mitchell. “You find the bits in the crud that are not crud, that feel true and right and just smack of authenticity and try to make those grow and grow and grow, until you go from islands of non-crud in a sea of crud to dwindling ponds of crud on a land mass of non-crud.”

You can’t have enough alternative perspectives, he says, because they help you move forward and learn. “Reality is complex,” he says, “and the more triangulation points you have to get a fix on it, the sharper the focus, the more interesting it becomes. So why wouldn’t you want to do that? To turn that dial up to 11 the best you can?”

Mr Mitchell was drawn to the late 1960s because it was a time when ideas could change reality. He mentions the Arab Spring a decade ago and early 1990s acid culture as “flickers of the same flame”, but says, “it was the last time that, if people believed something hard enough, the foundational blocks upon which society is constructed could be shifted and the new architecture could come about”.

The protests sparked by the death of Mr George Floyd erupted later on the day of our interview, so I wasn’t able to ask Mr Mitchell about systemic racism or Black Lives Matter or whether right now felt like a reality-changing time. But what he told me about why he set Utopia Avenue in that revolutionary period speaks for itself. “Anything worthwhile that we value, that makes our lives better than those of our great-great-grandparents in terms of equality, in terms of rights, in terms of longevity, in terms of a health system – it all begins with some whacko, nut-job visionary. Some utopian, naïve kid, who is ridiculed by all and sundry for not living in the real world.

“It might take 20 or 30 or 40 or 100 years for non-barons to be able to vote for non-billionaires of their age to run government departments, for people who are not white and male to run everything, but it begins with a glimpse of utopia. And that’s how important they were. There were so many of them. Just for a couple of years, it was quite dazzling. Organisations such as Greenpeace and Amnesty International – things that really make a difference right now – they trace their roots back to those years. That’s what drew me to the 1960s.” He pauses for a second. “And the music was just so damned good!”

Over the past few miserable months, the world seems to have become an infinitely more bleak place to live in. It is not the best of times to be productive – creative or otherwise. But in rereading some of Mr Mitchell’s novels for this interview, listening to his love and enthusiasm for the art of writing and receiving the generous amounts of advice he offered, something changed. For the first time in months, I felt able to pick up my pen and start writing again.

Towards the end of Utopia Avenue, Mr Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead says something to the band that offers that glimpse of utopia we so desperately need right now, something that inspires me in these unsettled times. “Every third or fourth generation is a generation of radicals, of revolutionaries. We, my friends, are the bottle-smashers. We release the genies. We run riot, get shot, infiltrated, bought off, die, go bust, sell out to the man. Sure as eggs is eggs. But the genies we let loose stay loose. In the ears of the young they whisper what was unsayable… In the short run, not a lot seems to change. Those kids are nowhere near the levers of power. Not yet. But in the long run? Those whispers are the blueprints of the future.”