Book Review: The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell (2014)

 


I bought this book in England during a visit home last Autumn, and read the last page here in Tromso, where we are enjoying a winter holiday in February. The snow outside has abated but the sky is dark, blotted with clouds, and the northern lights will probably not be dancing tonight. It’s taken me a while to complete this novel, but in my defence, it’s another long book and I am rather busy these days (hence the paucity of new posts here – sorry for that), and it’s certainly not an indication of a lack of enthusiasm for this latest Mitchell addition to my blog. At points through the middle of the story I thought The Bone Clocks might well end up my favourite work by this author, but in the end I think it comes in just behind Cloud Atlas.

There are many familiar traits in Mitchell’s sixth novel, including its composition, divided into six stories, the first set back in the 1980s, and each subsequent instalment jumping forward about a decade in time. This means the fourth story (set in 2015) was already poking into the future at the time the novel was published, and by the conclusion the present has advanced to 2043. The strongest thread between each chapter is the main character, and narrator of the first and final sections, Holly Sykes. In 1984 she’s a young teenager, hurt by love and determined to run away from her home. By the end of the book she’s a weary grandmother with all the unbelievable experiences behind her that these pages contain. The other blocks of the book are narrated by characters who encounter or are associated with Holly in some way – a fleeting lover, her husband, an unlikely friend, and, even more fantastically, a Horologist.

‘Bone Clocks’ refers to mortal humans, like me and (presumably) you. However, here there are two distinct groups of people who are able to cheat death – Anchorites, who preserve their own lives in perpetuum by taking that of others, and Horologists, who simply reincarnate and live an untold number of lives as different individuals stretching through the ages. These two groups of immortals are at war – the one wanting to permanently extinguish the other, and you can probably work out which group is on the side of the good. Holly Sykes is inadvertently and for much of the book unwittingly caught up in this dimension-shifting war, and the reader is similarly kept in the dark for a large part of the narrative. Her life is punctuated by unexplainable, paranormal tendencies and was scarred from the beginning by the haunting disappearance of her beloved younger brother, Jacko. All of this is connected to the immense, unseen battle going on in the background, to which Holly is eventually drawn, helping the Horologists deliver a final, fatal blow to the Anchorite world.

The final instalment sees an aged Holly struggling to survive with her granddaughter and an adopted grandson in Ireland, in a world in which law and order have broken down due mainly to overpopulation and environmental degradation. I found this to be the weakest part of the book, it’s arguably entirely unnecessary (the main story is done and dusted), and the way in which each sentence seems to include something to illustrate the woeful present in comparison to the wonderful past becomes a bit grating (“But what is cola? A fruit or a herb or what?”). The book’s appendix includes the transcript of an interview with David Mitchell in which he states how he foresees a bleak future for life on this planet, and he might well be right about that, but I don’t believe it’s going to play out in the way he’s chosen to depict it here.

Anyway, this is only a small complaint. Overall, the book is vastly enjoyable, unpredictable, the individual stories are gripping, and the overall construction is awesome. I’m already looking forward to immersing myself in another offering from David Mitchell as soon as I get the opportunity.

 

Favourite Character: There are many sides to Holly Sykes as we journey through her life, and overall she is an endearing character. There are other characters who you probably aren’t supposed to empathise with, but they are none the less enjoyable. However, I’m going to pick Ed Brubeck, Holly’s husband. He’s written out of the story fairly swiftly, but I liked him and could relate to his challenges as a father and a husband.


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