The Bone Clocks

“The Bone Clocks” opens with the story of 15-year-old Holly Sykes, who decides to run away after a fight with her mother. A promise to an old woman sets Holly on a path that will cross and run alongside the paths of the Atemporals, two groups of people who experience immortality in very different ways. The book is broken into 6 sections, spanning 6 decades, with each section being told from the point of view of someone who becomes important to Holly. Although there are elements of fantasy in the book, the majority of it is just the story of a fairly ordinary woman who is extraordinary in her resilience and strength. Throughout, Mitchell plays with different styles and voices and it all adds up to a fantastic novel.I read “Slade House” before this book, and though I loved it as well, the ending makes much more sense having read this. If you read this and enjoyed the psychosometric storyline, be sure to read “Slade House” next. In fact, I think that will be my next read, even though it’s only been a couple of months since I read it.

Most people have rendered some version of the following thought after reading more than a few Mitchell novels: is there anything he can't do? The Bone Clocks is a cinder block of a novel, my version's odometer clocking in at a voluminous 624. The plot revolves around Holly Sykes, first as a wayward child acting the part of a rebellious youth and running away from home, then four more narratives that helix-like intersperse with Holly's life, before finally returning to an elderly Holly Sykes. Mitchell buffets the narrative with his typically mealful prose. He is that rare virtuoso of both style and narrative; The Bone Clocks showcases him at his best, from the the feng shui of the six neatly nested matryoshka-like novellas, to the visceral and bodily styles of his metaphor: "cheekbones you'd slice your thumb on", laughs like "a sequence of glottal stops, like the noise a body might make as it falls down wooden stairs into a basement".That isn't to say everything here is great. The penultimate section depicts a psychosoteric battle between the big bad, the Anchorites, soul vampires who feed their immortality on the blood "decanted" from those who showcase some mental superpowers, and the magnanimous and ageless Horologists, who have "immortality as a birthright" who are trying to defeat the Anchorites, a scene that might uncharitably be read like an MCU fan-fic.Seeing my dead body against the wall, the Anchorites reason that no psychosoteric can now attack them, and their red shield flickers out. They’ll pay for this mistake. Incorporeally, I pour psychovoltage into a neurobolas and kinetic it at our assailants. It smacks into Imhoff and Westhuizen, the Fifth and Seventh Anchorites, respectively, and down they go. Three against seven. I ingress into Arkady to help him repair the shield, which turns a stronger blue and pushes back the remaining Anchorites. When Arkady glances back at Ōshima, however, I see his fight is lost. His body is evaporating as we look. Go to Holly, suborders Arkady. I obey without even thinking to bid him goodbye, an omission I regret even as I transverse to Holly, ingress, evoke an Act of Total Suasion, and … Now what?Despite this brief departure, a turn that might not suit Mitchell's talents as well as other styles (is laser beam shooting action an answer to this review's initial question?), the denouement of the novel returns to the immensely personal reality of life, a now elderly Holly Sykes forced to live in a world that never beat climate change, to a world on the cusp of becoming a hellscape of barbarism, and returning to Mitchell the reins he is much more capable of wielding: exceptionally well-crafted dialogue, perfect pacing, and a fine eye for the twitches of humanity that enfleshes his characters.While most of Mitchell's work defies genre, The Bone Clocks might be said to occupy that rarefied place of literary science fiction, and he has more than a passing similarity to writers like Marukami, Ishiguro, or Rushdie, all of whom have to varying degrees embraced the fantastic in their fiction. The Bone Clocks represents the most concentrated dive for Mitchell into the fantastic. In the past, the ethereal occupied a "tree in a school play" role in his fiction, but this novel is almost entirely foregrounded with this otherworldly-ness, sometimes drowning the humanity of his fully realized characters. The way Mitchell adds in this psychic showdown between immortals feels almost like when Bob Ross would draw a gigantic tree in the middle of his painting with two minutes left in an episode, painting over the painstakingly rendered bushes and trees and rocks and shorelines, and there is nothing that makes the literati more squeamish than a science fiction or fantasy plot. Perhaps we can call it magical realism, and perhaps this is another thing in the ever-growing list of things Mitchell can do in the (definitely not) dead novel.

Last week I had a test for lactose intolerance that required me to say in the clinic for four hours; the nurse advised me beforehand to take a good book. I chose the only David Mitchell novel I hadn’t yet read, The Bone Clocks. I anticipated, as a longtime Mitchell reader, that the book would be engaging, and it was. The nurse remarked that I looked miserable when the test started but I perked up after I opened the book. By the time I was free to leave, I had started the second chapter. The Bone Clocks is long novel- over 590 pages- yet as I completed one section I felt compelled to continue straight to the next.Several reviewers have noted that the book’s structure of six sections, each narrated in the first person by different characters, reflect Mitchell’s 2004 Cloud Atlas. The first and last chapters are the most outstanding: the book starts in Graveshead in 1984, with 15 year old Holly Sykes leaving home to strike out for herself. At the book’s end, it is 2043, and the elderly Holly, her granddaughter and her adopted diabetic grandson are striving to survive in a village on the Irish coast. The first chapter is rich in Holly’s views of her new life as a nearly fully grown fledging, while the last presents her stuggling in a future with no electricity, shortages of fuel, and little working technology. Her Ireland is occupied by Chinese businesses with the cooperation of “Stability”, the governing Irish forces. After the Chinese decide that their Irish territories are no longer profitable and withdraw, she realises their precarious existence, dependant on the diesel and boxes of food rations given by Chinese in exchange for meat and freshly grown produce, is about to be overrun by armed gangs snatching the few available resources from house to house, killing anyone who protests, and murdering their own leaders to usurp power.The other chapters are narrated by characters who establish roles in Holly’s life during the fifty nine years between the accounts of her youth and her old age; her lover, Hugo Lamb, who meets her at the start of 1990s, her schoolfriend Ed Brubeck who becomes her partner and father of her daughter, and two close friends, one a novelist named Crispin Hershey who grows to respect her as an author, although he despises her at first for drawing far bigger audiences for her appearances at literary festivals, and for her memoir about the voices she heard as a child and the mysterious disappearance of her younger brother Jacko. I was enthralled by Mitchell’s startling use of language and the utterly convincing authenticity of the worldviews of the cocksure duplicitous Cambridge student Hugo and the hardened world touring literary celebrity Crispin, both astounded to find themselves feeling genuine warmth and caring with Holly.Yet while I felt compelled to read The Bone Clocks to the end, I felt that Mitchell has covered these grounds before, particularly in his first novel Ghostwritten, which features chapters told by different first person narrators, and a non-corporeal being that can transfer from one body to another. One reviewer said of The Bone Clocks , “Mitchell is also doing what all ambitious writers do: writing the same novel over and over again, improving it every time.” The first four sections of the The Bone Clocks are interrupted intermittently by visions of an ethereal blonde woman and portentous men who levitate others, kill them with gestures of their hands, take over their bodies, and lure astonished witnesses to join them, disclosing that all things must die, but “this iron clause may be rewritten”. The fifth section is dominated by the conflict between the immortal Horologists and the Anchorites. While the Horologists are reborn after death in mortal bodies, the Anchorities live on through murdering people who have psychic gifts. A Horologist tells Holly he saved her from danger when she was a child through his identity as a Chinese Doctor named Marinus, an allusion to a character from Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.The recurrence of an immortal life-force that can take possession of people’s bodies was more powerfully employed in Ghostwritten, where it contrasted with the dangerous realities of its characters living throughout the globe and suggested that a spirit connected them all, and sought to keep their world from being destroyed. Another reviewer of The Bone Clocks remarked that the battle of the Horologists and Anchorites and its dialogue resembled Marvel Comics. I was transfixed in places by the description of the otherworldly Chapel of the Dusk and ultimate subduing of the Anchorites, but the struggles in the labyrinth, the hidden chakka eyes, and life restoring golden apples didn’t evoke legend and religious imagery for me. They did make me go back to read their short appearances in the earlier chapter, but the myths and permanence of the benevolent Horologists and ominous Anchorites aren’t as gripping as the realism of the chapters set in ...

The Bone Clocks is a novel of interconnected stories, much like Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. The stories here, however, are presented in chronological order, each touching on a stage in the life of Holly Sykes, which intersects with a hidden war between two powerful factions. The first and last story follow Holly herself, while those in between follow other people in Holly’s life.The book begins in 1984 with “A Hot Spell,” following a teenage Holly in Southeastern England as she runs away from home. This section is mostly slice of life, with a few descriptions of the “weird s***” in Holly’s life, as well as some bizarre events that hint at the supernatural.“Myrrh is Mine, its Bitter Perfume” switches to Hugo Lamb, a student at Cambridge in 1991. Lamb is an amoral character, possibly a psychopath, who exploits his wealthier friends for personal gain. He encounters Holly while on vacation in a Swiss ski resort. The weirder subplots don’t show up again until the very end.“The Wedding Bash” moves to the wedding of Holly’s older sister in 2004. This section is told by Ed Brubeck, who appeared in the first section as Holly’s classmate, and who is now her life partner. Ed is a reporter in Iraq, and events alternate between the wedding and his experiences in occupied Iraq. Things get a bit political and heavy handed here, but not to the point of annoyance.By 2015, Holly has become a successful author after publishing a book on her strange experiences. “Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet” is narrated by the titular author who soon befriends Holly while on various book tours. Mitchell takes a few self-deprecating jabs at himself and his books here, as well.The more fantastical elements become the focus in “An Horologist’s Labyrinth,” which is narrated by a mysterious character known as Marinus. There are some discussions of past-lives here that are pretty awesome, but the ultimate reveal of what’s been going on comes off a bit cheesy and infodump-y after the more mysterious slow burn of previous chapters.The final section, “Sheep’s Head,” returns to Holly in 2043, now in her seventies. Here the world is in the midst of an energy and food crisis due to climate change. Things are pretty heavy-handed here again, but overall the depiction is pretty realistic and scarily plausible.There are some hints to connections with Mitchell’s other books, including Cloud Atlas. The Bone Clocks is very ambitious, and reaches some very high points, but has some bumps along the way. Definitely worth reading, and a great mix of the realistic and the fantastic.

I read this book when it first came out. I read it again few months later. I was trying to see how all of the chapters fit together - what does it all mean? Was I missing some grand design, message? Various chapters and sections from David Mitchell's other similarly structured books (Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas) had common themes that loosely bundled the stories together. I could not find a similar common theme in Bone Clocks and it was very disconcerting. And I think plenty of other people shared this feeling. Well, I for one stopped obsessing about missed meanings and interpretations and just enjoyed the pure storytelling prowess of David Mitchell. And such amazing writing. I thought the sci fi/fantasy section (chapter 5) was original, creative and easy to follow. Shaded Way, Dusk, psychodecanting, psychodumdum, psychovoltage - you can figure out what they mean by their usage in the action or the narrative. In contrast, The Wedding Bash was very disappointing. It is not badly written, but not what I have come to expect from David Mitchell; relatively speaking it was hackneyed, regurgitated, boring same old criticism that we have all heard hundreds of times before. Come on, David - you can do much better. In terms of specific characters, I found Holly to be rather flat, except in the fight sequences and at Sheep's Head. I wish more was written about Hugo Lamb, who I thought had that curious blend of both evil and vulnerable qualities that made the character quite compelling - yes, there are varying level of bad behavior. It was nice to see Marinus and his character had believable continuity from Thousand Autumns. Hopefully, we will see him/her again and again... It is also good to see that Mo from Ghostwritten is alive and somewhat well, although her situation s becoming quite precarious.For his next book, David Mitchell should stop flirting with science fiction and go all out for full length novel,