DAVID MITCHELL The Bone Clocks. Reviewed by Kylie Mason
The author of Cloud Atlas returns with a genre-bending new work, long-listed for the 2014 Booker Prize.
David Mitchell has made a name as the kind of writer who loves to take risks. His novels experiment with literary forms and genres, offering readers intricate stories that surprise as often as they enthral. Since his breakthrough 2004 novel, Cloud Atlas, he has become a kind of literary rock star, and his fans eagerly await each new title. This is the case with his latest work, The Bone Clocks, and their devotion is mostly rewarded: Mitchell has once again woven an innovative, mesmerising narrative that travels from Gravesend in 1984 through multiple characters and dimensions and 60 years to a post-apocalyptic town on the Irish coast.
The novel is in six parts and we first meet Holly Sykes, ostensibly the novel’s protagonist, as a 15-year-old runaway in the first section, ‘The Hot Spell’. Holly has a history of hearing strange voices in her head – the Radio People – but they’ve been silent since Doctor Marinus treated her as a child. Now Holly’s greatest concern is punishing both her mother, for slapping her during a heated argument, and her boyfriend, for not being as devoted as she had believed, by staying away from home just long enough to be missed. On the road, she meets the strange fisherwoman Esther Little and a classmate, Ed Brubeck, both of whom offer her support in her journey. But while she is away, her younger brother, Jacko, disappears.
In the 1991 of ‘Myrrh is Mine, its Bitter Perfume’, Holly is the 22-year-old love interest of upwardly mobile Hugo Lamb, Cambridge scholar, dutiful son, loyal friend and incorrigible grifter. By 2004 and ‘The Wedding Bash’, she is the long-term partner of war correspondent Ed Brubeck and the mother of six-year-old Aoife. Crispin Hershey encounters Holly in 2015 at Hay-on-Wye at the start of ‘Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet’, during a long tour to promote his latest, disappointing, novel. Holly is new to the festival scene, having written The Radio People, a memoir of her unwanted precognitive abilities, and Crispin is instantly both envious and dismissive of her. When Marinus re-enters Holly’s life in ‘An Horologist’s Labyrinth’, it is 2025 and she is a recluse, hounded by fans of her book and crackpots claiming to be her missing brother, Jacko. But Marinus is not the gentle doctor she remembers – he is an Horologist, an Atemporal being who has been reincarnated over thousands of years. Marinus and the other Horologists are fighting a war against the Anchorites, devourers of human souls, and Holly is essential to their plan. Her life, after all, has been designed for this final battle. But the battle is not all her life has been designed for, and in 2043, in ‘Sheep’s Head’, Holly is a devoted grandmother to Lorelei and Rafiq in a dystopian world of dwindling resources.
When it concentrates on the extraordinariness of everyday lives, The Bone Clocks is vintage Mitchell: sharp, insightful, thoughtful and sensitive. Regret is the novel’s central theme and it is skilfully handled as the characters deal with the consequences of their actions and decisions. After Holly learns of Jacko’s disappearance, she gets ‘that nasty floaty feeling you get in a lift when you can’t trust the floor’; cynical writer Crispin Hershey has ‘countless times … ached to undo my rash little misdeed but, as the Arabic proverb has it, not even God can change the past’. Even Marinus the Horologist acknowledges: ‘A metalife of one thousand four hundred years is no guarantee that you always know the right thing to do.’
Holly is a fine character, and to have followed her life through her interactions with the men she encounters would have made a satisfying and moving novel. But The Bone Clocks is a frustrating work. Despite employing different narrators for each section, the narrative voices throughout have a curious homogeny, rendering the characters almost indistinguishable. Perhaps this was intentional, to reflect the Horologists’ habit of only paying lip-service to gender as part of identity; a kind of exploration of how, inside our heads, we all sound the same. But the Horologists and Anchorites and their fantasy subplot present larger problems than a monotonous narrative voice – the subplot feels unrelated to any other part of the book, despite the obvious effort to weave it into each section. It isn’t clear what Mitchell is trying to say about the nature of humanity or the afterlife with this odd, disorienting plot about a struggle between good and evil over human souls. It’s almost as though he had difficulties connecting the six sections and thought this was the best way to do it.
The success of the novel’s realist aspects makes the fantasy and future elements harder to believe too. The author’s reliance on clumsy fantasy flourishes like the Horologists’ ‘sub’ speaking (‘subask’, ‘substate’, etc), seems needlessly over the top when readers are familiar with terms like ‘telepathy’, and cuts into the suspension of disbelief required for readers to fully immerse themselves in the later parts of the novel. Such inelegant aspects are at odds with his capable, confident and erudite chronicling of the ‘real world’ and only highlight how sophisticated and seemingly effortless Mitchell’s writing is when he’s exploring the everyday lives of interesting people.
David Mitchell The Bone Clocks Sceptre 2014 PB 608pp $29.99
Kylie Mason is a freelance book editor based in Sydney. www.kyliemmason.com
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Thanks so much for your insightful review. I loved Cloud Atlas but it sounds like I might find this disappointing too. Maintaining a lot of characters and their distinctive points of view is very hard. I gave it a good go in Crossing Paths with 8 characters (partly inspired by Mitchell) but feel that with one or two of my characters ultimately needed more work to differentiate them. It is a serious challenge that is often overlooked!
This is the way I felt about Cloud Atlas. Loved the writing and the characters, but felt like he was trying to say BIG THINGS about HUMANITY and the MEANING OF EXISTENCE but not quite succeeding.