The Bone Clocks

If asked to name the best storytellers at work today, David Mitchell would have to be in my top ten for sure. In this new novel we see him at his narrative best, continuing to display a virtuosity and mastery of different styles and tones, while simultaneously telling a thoroughly fascinating story. I greatly enjoyed the subtle callbacks to his earlier works, but the whole book is captivating in its own right. While I didn't find the fantastical elements particularly compelling (a bit too black-and-white), I didn't mind that in the slightest since the other portions were so strong.

There's much more I could say, but I don't want to spoil anything, so just go read the book!

“...if you bare your arse to a vengeful unicorn, the number of possible outcomes dwindles to one.”

Holly Sykes is a fifteen year old runaway. She is sensitive and gifted. She occasionally hears "voices" and has been visited by the Radio People, who drop prophetic announcements. All of this, will come clear as the years go on and this mysterious group begins to overshadow and endanger Holly's life. This story spans many decades and a score of characters weave in and out, with shifting narratives. It is best, that I leave much of the twisty plot undisclosed.

Obviously, I wanted to love this sprawling, chaotic novel and for most of the first half, I did just that. And then things begin to bust at the seams as the latter half becomes show more unnecessarily convoluted. The assembly line of characters, some morphing into other identities, can be hard to follow. I had a difficult time connecting with the apocalyptic showdown, between the supernatural forces, preferring the more grounded passages, but I did enjoy the lengthy dystopian conclusion.
There is still much here to admire. Mitchell's wordplay and craftsmanship is dazzling. Holly Sykes is a wonderful creation, along with a couple other of the principal players. Fans of Mitchell will have to give this a go but I would not advise starting with this book. I wish the author would have followed the advice of Great Aunt Eilish, in one of the later chapters:

"...if you want a thing, get it the old-fashioned way, by elbow grease and brain power. Don't mess with the fairies." show less

Let's begin at the end. In the final section of what is essentially a work of several linked novellas, civilization is falling apart. That is, "Western Civilization" is falling apart, as China is still on the rise 20 years after the publication of The Bone Clocks.

At first, this novella feels out of place from all of the others. The epic battle between good and evil that provides the tension in every other novella does not appear to feature prominently here. And it's set just far enough into the near-future to somehow feel both plausible and implausible.

A review of the other novellas, though, reveals that these events are central to the themes of the book--mortality and how we humans, we Bone Clocks, are to face it. For Mitchell is not show more just concerned with individual mortality, but civilization-wide mortality. Just as Ed Brubeck witnesses Iraqi civilization, as it were, crumble in 2005, the characters in the final novella must come to terms with the death of their civilization.

The Anchorites feed on the young to stave off their own death just as our civilization is feasting on the natural resources of our children and grandchildren for our lifestyle today. But all things come to an end. Bone clocks come to a stop and the Chapel collapses eventually, as will every civilization in its time. show less

The Short Version: do yourself a favour and read this book

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This is astonishingly good. The audiobook was twenty-four hours long and I enjoyed every minute of it.

David Mitchell has managed to go toe-to-toe with modern fantasy writers in terms of creating supernatural beings and magical systems and a long struggle between darkness and light. Then he's raised the game by embedding the story in a vividly evoked past and a credible near-future and telling it all through the eyes of engaging, credible, memorable characters.

David Mitchell let me take up residence in the heads of people who were very different from show more each other and often only loosely associated with one another and I believed in each of them, even the ones I didn't like. In one case he let me occupy the head of the same person when they were in their teens and in their sixties and succeeded in showing me that they were and weren't the same person.

The book goes from the nineteen eighties to the twenty forties. Capturing the decades that I've already lived through so accurately meant his descriptions of the parts in the future felt real and prophetic.

I strongly recommend that you make the time to listen to this audiobook. It's exceptional.

The Longer Version - what reading 'The Bone Clocks' was like

This is such a long book and such a good book that I want to share the reactions I had to it as I went along.

In the beginning

I bought 'The Bone Clocks' in 2014 when it was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Maybe that was where things went wrong. I'd mentally shelved it as 'Literature' with a capital L for LONG (the audiobook is 24hours of listening) and didn't pick it up again, even when it won the 2015 World Fantasy Award. Now it's being hailed as an on-topic climate change book Anyway, I decided it had to go on my Read Or Throw list and I finally started it today.

WOW. I'm immediately and totally in Kent in the 1980s, following a fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes, who is leaving home after a row and I'm learning about the 'weird shit' in her history when she could hear 'the radio people' and I don't want to put this down.

Holly is engaging and believable and seeing 80s Gravesend through her eyes is like watching a huge UHD screen where no detail is lost.

At the end of Part 2

What stood out about Part 1, the Holly Sykes section of the book was the realism of the account. Holly sounds like a fifteen-year-old girl who has run away from home. All the details and the people are right. Which makes the supernatural stuff, when it finally arrives in a burst of violence, seem even more vivid. Lots of trailing of snippets of information about some kind of supernatural war, with comments from both sides, but not enough to do more than make me curious. The violence was graphic but believable.

Just as I was settling down in Holly's head, we skip forward from 1985 to 1991 and I find myself sitting in the mind of Hugo, a repugnant young man who is about to graduate from Cambridge. He's bright, slick, at least amoral and possibly evil and he embodies many of the reasons why I had no desire to go to Cambridge or Oxford. I'm already hoping something bad will happen to him, that I'll be there to watch and that it takes a while.

Mitchell knows how to press my buttons.

I liked the definition of power offered to Hugo by what he does not yet know is a supernatural entity. It's a clever definition and one that undermines the smug, short-term, fundamentally middle-class definition of power that Hugo offered (the ability to make people do things they don't want to do or not do things they do want to do). It pictures power as a virus or a parasite moving from host to host.

Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers. The mad tend to crave it. Many of the sane crave it but the wise tend to worry about its long-term side-effects. Power is crack-cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul. Power's comings and goings from host to host, via war, marriage, ballot box, dictations and accident of birth are the plot of history. The empowered may serve justice, remodel the earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields and bring down skyscrapers but power itself is amoral.

I rather like this idea of power as a vampire, using and finally draining its hosts.

At the end of Part 3

With each part of the book, we move from one head to another, not just change the eyes that you're looking at the story through. Each Part is a novella conveying the personality, history and hopes of the person at its centre. It's as if the author is moving from body to body and sitting as an unnoticed passenger at the back of each character's mind, rather like the disembodied supernaturals at the edges of the story.

I've just finished the third novella. It's so vivid and real. A wonderful intercutting of a memory of being in Bagdad the week before as a war correspondent and the flatter reality of being at a family wedding. The pull of the addictive danger of a war zone is set against the love of his child and his wife. This was totally gripping and highly emotional and managed to balance the wedding and the war in terms of trauma.

At the end of the book

I got swept up in the story and didn't keep detailed notes as I went along but here's what stood out for me:

The change of tone as we follow the jaded Lit Fic author to bookish events around the world was astonishing. I was amazed to find myself feeling compassion for this dried out, successful but disappointed man. Inevitably, I wondered if he was Mitchell's portrait in the attic, the man he's hoping not to be. This was reinforced when the author suggests to his editor that he wants to write a fantasy novel that's also literary fiction. The editor believes this can't be done. It sounds a lot like a pitch for 'The Bone Clocks'.

The battle between the dark and light supernatural forces was brilliantly conceived and executed. In any other book, this would have been the big bang finish. Not in this book though. In this book, we see the reality that the struggle never stops, regardless of the price paid.

The final portion of the book, which takes place in Sheep's Head in County Cork in 2043, was outstanding and disturbing. We return to Holly Sykes' head. She's now sixty-four and caring for her granddaughter and an adopted child. The world that's being evoked is one coming to terms with the reality of climate change. One where the young are turning their anger on the boomers who made the mess they must now live through, where the Church is again pushing for control of Ireland, where the Chinese are the only functioning super power. Holly calls this unravelling of the world she grew up in 'the Endarklement'. It's grim and very plausible. And yet the thing that struck me most was how I could see in this sixty-four year-old woman the fifteen year-old girl she had been and all the changes she'd lived through.



I strongly recommend the audiobook version which benefits from multiple narrators, all of whom do a great job. I see that there's a new audiobook being released this month which is only ten hours long but which isn't marked as abridged. I don't know how they're managing that. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear an extract from the version I listened to.

https://soundcloud.com/audibleuk/the-bone-clocks-by-david-mitchell show less

This book has a bit of an identity crisis. On the one hand, it's a web of individuals' stories that interconnect, a crisscrossing tangle of tales, with separate sections narrated by several characters whose lives cross paths. On the other hand, it's a bad Harry Potter wannabe.

The first version presents a wide scope, covering different continents, different characters, and delving so deeply into their personalities, neuroses, and lives that before long we care deeply about each, which is generally a good thing in a novel. Here, however, we are left in the lurch at the end of one particular character's thread as that character drops off the page, and pick up with a different one, but at the worst possible moment to pick up a new story. show more For example, we are left wondering, after Holly's first section, what happened with Jacko, her relationship with her mother, with Ed, and even with Vinny. Hugo's section ends with its own questions: did he join, did he not? What was he suspected of by the police? And did he ever get in touch with Holly again? Same thing with Ed. We pick up his story several years on, to find that his storyline with Holly has simply been elided and it's several years down the road, when the best parts of their tale are missing. And how does his story end? Does he go back or not? We don't pick up the tails of these storylines till hundreds of pages later.

The other, supernatural theme, is really the core of the book, and serves to link all the stories and characters together. In fact, all the disparate characters and their histories sort of lead up to the climactic last part of the novel, basically a good-vs-evil battle of the super-people vs the soul vampires. So the problem is, if that's the crux of your book, why meander for 400 pages of character analysis and backstory?

The supernatural theme is also a bit cheesy. Some of the lines given to the characters make you wince, and the terminology and ideas relating to these spiritual super-people are a bit meh. ""die-die"? "suasion"? "decanting souls"? "psychosoterics"? You might as well throw in a few "horcruxes" and get it over with.

I wanted to love this book. I loved "Cloud Atlas" (how do you underline in this review?) because of the richly developed individualized and highly realized worlds Mitchell created for each character and situation and time. We get that here, except that instead of the sweeping picture of interconnectedness on a universal, global, and spiritual level that you have in that novel, here, while we have tighter connections between characters (they know each other, for example), the supernatural element that links them all is a bit silly. show less

Title - The Bone Clocks

Author - David Mitchell

Summary -

Fifteen year old Holly Sykes is in a spot. She leaves her home after a horrible fight with her mother and finds out her boyfriend (the one she got in a fight over with her mom and ran out to move in with) is cheating on her with her best friend. Well she cant go back home so she just keeps going. Holly is different than most young girls though, she once could hear voices in her head, visions that melt into the reality of her mind. She has learned to hide them but they are always just there, on the edges of her world.

But the young runaway finds out the world is a lot darker than she imagined. Soon after she leaves her young brother Jacko goes missing and the police, assuming he is show more with Holly won't even start searching. Holly rushes back home but Jacko is never found.

Holly's life is about to change considerably. She has come to the attention of a society of eternal beings and her lost weekend is just the beginning. Holly is caught up in a War between two powerful factions. The Anchorites and the Horology. They are always there, on the periphery of existence. The Anchorites feed on children to maintain their mortality. But only gifted children with psychic abilities, like Holly and her brother Jacko. The Horologists try to protect the children but their numbers are few and the Anchorites grow.

This war rages on and throughout her life Holly is kept hidden from it. But it is always there, effecting all around her, until she can no longer remain hidden and must join in the battle.

Review -

The Bone Clocks builds its tale through characters and sub plots until it is joined together in the end in a final battle to save mankind from becoming a feeding ground for the soul eating Anchorites. Mitchell does a wonderful job of creating small stories within the novel that lead into the true plot.

Holly Sykes is a powerful and flawed woman who you will follow throughout her life as others weave in and out of her world. The narration is often in the voice of others and Holly and the eternal battle for the souls of mankind are just a shade in what is happening in these lives. Until, for better or worse, the eternal battle slams into these characters. But Holly herself is a very well developed character and her pain and suffering are as much a part of her as her love and triumphs.

This is fantasy fiction on a grand scale. What the Bone Clocks does so well is that it relies little on the fantasy part of its story but more on the human interaction and drama. When the fantasy does come into play it is always an intrusion. An accident in the story, a sideswipe or head on collision that will change the lives of the characters completely.

Mitchell builds the plot slowly. Depending on his skill and prose as a storyteller to hold you as the grander vision of the Bone Clocks opens up. This might be a gamble for some writers but for Mitchell, it is done with ease and flair. There is never a moment of desperation in the novel that it might lose you. Its sheer confidence in it story keeps you involved and wanting to know more. But Mitchell peels it back slowly until the final chapters where he reveals the true nature of the Bone Clocks.

His timing is impeccable.

Easily, one of the best novels of the year! show less

Is there any fiction that is completely devoid of the mechanisms of science fiction or fantasy? Perhaps not, but David Mitchell's novels, while marketed as literary fiction and boasting jackets free of genre stigmata, are most assuredly invested in the principal devices and tropes of both science fiction (narratives set in projected futures) and fantasy (paranormal and occult powers). The Bone Clocks is divided into major sections distributed over the period from 1984 to 2043, with a series of interrelated first-person narrators, most of whom are about my age, as is Mitchell himself. The connecting plot of the novel is a "war in heaven" scenario featuring rival groups with praeterhuman powers, operating unseen in the midst of human show more society. I found it superior to similar stories such as Roger Zelazny's Amber series or, say, the original Matrix movie, because of the far greater emphasis on and development of the mundane life of the characters, allowing the irruptions of the weird to genuinely shock.

As he did in Cloud Atlas, Mitchell includes a plot-line set in the literary industry, and involving animus between an author and a critic. A quote from the critic's panning of the book Echo Must Die was surely one of the more backhandedly reflexive pieces of text I've read recently: "One: Hershey is so bent on avoiding cliche that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistleblower. Two: The fantasy sub-plot clashes so violently with the book's State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look. Three: What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer writing a writer-character?" (294) While I don't think that any of those three criticisms would be accurate for The Bone Clocks, they were almost certainly Mitchell's three chief worries about the possible weaknesses of this long book. In fact, the prose is very accessible, and the different characters' voices are distinct and engaging. The "fantasy sub-plot" is more of a "super-plot," and seems to have a constructive relationship to the contemporary issues raised by the mundane events of the novel. And the Crispin Hershey writer-character allows for a level of intertextual creativity that I suspect I have only begun to appreciate, since I haven't yet read most of Mitchell's work. In fact, at least three of the narrating characters are writers, by the time the whole picture is put together.

The book has three of its six sections set in the future of its composition, one of them now largely in our past. "Crispin Hershey's Lonely Planet" begins in 2015, in a book published in 2014, and continues through 2020. "An Horologist's Labyrinth" is the longest section, supplying the climax of the super-plot and taking place in 2025, and the denouement "Sheep's Head" is set in 2043. I found these projected settings fairly credible, if not optimistic. Well, the last of them actually bummed me out more than a little, but I don't regret reading it, and I won't condemn the "State of the World pretensions" that inform it.

LibraryThing includes The Bone Clocks as the second of three novels in a series called "Horologists." Wikipedia, however, points out the continuities of character and setting to five other books by Mitchell, so that it sits in a larger web of connected texts, accounting for the majority of the author's published books. I'm sure I'll read more of these. show less