Julian Novitz

It kind of captured the kind of the tension and the expectation of having them meet and having them form a band.

and trying to succeed and failing.

And you know they're going to succeed eventually.

It's not really a spoiler to say that because you have to fill in the next 400 pages of the novel.

But this good kind of level of suspense that's built out of their early gigs and their early kind of clashes and conflicts and tensions and meetings before they kind of meld into a band.

So I like that level.

I mean, one thing that I did, and this kind of touches on the point of 60s music nostalgia,

that you raise here is that there's quite a lot of kind of cameos or sudden appearances from figures from the period.

So, you know, John Lennon shows up, we get a meeting with Jimi Hendrix later on, David Bowie makes a couple of enigmatic appearances throughout the novel.

And some of those kind of worked for me, but others started to feel a little bit, I suppose, gratuitous at various points.

They were

They weren't quite just part of the setting and the background and the atmosphere, but they became a little bit intrusive when every kind of figure from that period had to kind of step forward and have a little conversation with the band at various points.

So that's the point where I suppose the 60s nostalgia became a little bit overwhelming for me.

But I did enjoy the characters and I did enjoy their particular journey throughout this novel.

Well, I enjoy Jasper as a character throughout the novel.

He has, I think, interesting and enjoyable perspective on the band and their activities and their music.

And I found his interactions with the other characters just delightful throughout the story.

For fans of David Mitchell, I mean, Jasper's last name, Dezoit, will give away the fact that he's related to

very distantly related to the protagonist of his earlier, Mitchell's earlier novel, The Thousand and Eight Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which is set in Japan in the 17th century.

And the supernatural kind of plot that follows on from the knocking that Jasper hears in his brain is kind of distantly connected to that novel.