The Bone Clocks

What if there was an invisible war being waged between small groups of people who could live forever? What if those little moments of intuition some people have were gifts, and that precognition was real? This is the backdrop to David Mitchell’s latest tome, which is an ambitious blend of fantasy and reality told over 1984 to 2043 in six segments.

Mitchell is a masterful author who always brings a lot to the table. In this book, I liked the elements of realism best. The fantasy element is always hovering, but it’s often in the background, and I loved the stories told from four different character’s perspectives, including a teenager going through a rebellious phase, a college-aged hedonist, a war reporter in Iraq, and an aging, show more bitter author. All of them revolve around or intersect a single woman, Holly Sykes. The book’s final chapter with the world as we know it breaking down was also quite realistic, and in a disturbing way.

By contrast, during the fifth of the six chapters in the book, where the fantasy plot comes to a boil, it felt at times like I was reading a Harry Potter book, and a little predictable. However, that’s not a horrible thing (hey I loved the HP series), and it was certainly never boring.

More importantly to me, Mitchell continues to show his gifts for psychological insight, humor, and cultural breadth. His characters have subtlety. And as in his other books, he’s at his very best in letting the insidiousness of evil unfold and become apparent to the reader gradually.

There are characters that appear from his past novels, most notably Hugo Lamb, who Mitchell fans may remember from Black Swan Green. One of his recurring themes does as well: that evil exists in the world in many forms, and it must be confronted. Mitchell reminds us of the beauty of life and mankind’s finest traits, and at the same how fragile it all is. Change is inevitable, and so is pain. There will always be an ebb and flow between the angels of our better natures, and darkness. Mitchell’s use of either recurring characters or the “reincarnated” here who continue to battle generation after generation are, I think, symbols for the heroes in any day and age who must rise to fight the good fight. He’s an intelligent, inspiring author, and even if fantasy is not your cup of tea, if you suspend disbelief for a bit, you’ll find things you like here.

Quotes:
On heaven, or small, beautiful moments:
“’What if…what if heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you’re dying of thirst, or when someone’s nice to you for no reason, or…’ Mam’s pancakes with Mars Bar sauce; Dad’s dashing up from the bar just to tell me, ‘Sleep tight don’t let the bedbugs bite’; or Jacko and Sharon singing ‘For She’s a Squishy Marshmalow’ instead of ‘For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ every single birthday and wetting themselves even though it’s not at all funny; and Brendan giving his old record player to me instead of one of his mates. ‘S’pose heaven’s not like a painting that’s just hanging there forever, but more like … like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you’re alive, from passing cars, or…upstairs windows when you’re lost…’”

On power:
“’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 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, diktat, 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.’ Immaculee Constantin now looks up at me. ‘Power will notice you. Power is watching you now. Carry on as you are, and power will favor you. But power will also laugh at you, mercilessly, as you lie dying in a private clinic, a few fleeting decades from now. Power mocks all its illustrious favorites as they lie dying. ‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away.’”

On youth, from Joseph Conrad’s short story ‘Youth’:
“By all that’s wonderful it is the sea, I believe, the sea itself – or is it youth alone? Who can tell? But you here – you all had something out of life: money, love – whatever one gets on shore – and, tell me, wasn’t that the best time, that time we were young at sea; young and had nothing, on the sea that gives nothing, except hard knocks – and sometimes a chance to feel your strength – that only – what you all regret?’” show less

There's so much to like, the writing and voice is amazing, the scope and ambition also amazing. Holly is the most compulsively readable of the characters. To be honest I'd read an entire non spec fic book just about her life.

The speculative elements felt intrusive and confusing at times, and Mitchell moves perspective in a way that only litfic can get away with (watch a genre book get shot down in flames for attempting that!) I was perhaps less interested in the speculative elements than the real world ones, which had muddled worldbuilding at times and mysterious motivations in excess.

However, I can forgive those vagaries as a) being an intentional style choice and b) this isn't considered a downside in litfic, afaik. Genre fiction show more tends to have stricter standards for its worldbuilding than litfic.

Some of the characters were excellent, even though I disliked them as people. Crispin Hershey was a fucking pathetic human being yet really compelling and interesting, and I did feel sorry for him overall. Hugo Lamb, though was hard to read, I found him so unpleasant. I'm glad he hasnt' got many sections.

There is just SO MUCH going on in the novel... so many references, analyses, musings, cultural dips and dives, a billion different things. It's long, but not wordy or airy; every sentence is packed.

I would very much recommend this novel for fans of 15 Lives of Harry August (Claire North) as there are many similar and overlapping themes, but done in a very different way. 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

Outside the last two chapters, I loved this book. Mitchell's writing is incredible. His main characters are flawlessly written.

The last two chapters could have been just as good were it not for the abrupt switch into fantasy Harry Potter-style magic mixed with Westernized Eastern religions in the penultimate chapter, which was abrupt and very unwelcome. It came as a tremendous information dump, leading to the ridiculous battle.

The final chapter was good, except for the lengthy and overly wrought disaster movie lecture on climate change, which droned on for far too long and added little to the overall story.

I find this book very difficult to review and rate fairly.

It follows Holly Sykes, a wayward teen from the weekend she decides to ‘run away’ from home and that decision, whether by chance or fate, sets the course of the next 60 years.

This is my first David Mitchell book and I love his writing in this. I often found myself savouring a turn of phrase or a whole section over and over again. The characters are so real and three dimensional you can’t help enjoy learning all about them, even those challenging to like. I also loved the time breaks and the seeds that were placed over years to lead us to the 'present day' chapters... that said there was so much of the book that seemed superfluous to the plot. Whole characters who were show more given centre stage and over a hundred pages of story but ultimately had no role to play in the overall plot of the book. Were these meant to be a red herring to the reader or simply a stop gap measure – with breadcrumbs of important information - to fill a time period until we get to the final story? It certainly felt like that.

The whole last section of the book left me confused as to why it was included, I felt if the book started with this chapter I would be hooked but coming at the end it felt over plotted and really disruptive to the conclusion… but yet the ending itself was satisfying.

So this is my dilemma… I liked the book but could I recommend it? Maybe to a very specific reader… one who is willing to take a chance and invest time into a beautifully written but complicated and convoluted story… something like a life itself. show less

In The Bone Clocks you can find all the reasons why people love David Mitchell and find him intensely frustrating as an author. There are many things about this book that wholly admirable and engrossing. Firstly, he's great at teenage angst and drawing believable teenage characters. And so the escapades and disappointments of the young Holly Sykes would be story enough for most writers, and probably most readers.

Secondly he's great at creating different narratives at different times in different voices - and making it all pull together. The chapter focused on the Dick Dastardly-esque Hugo Lamb and the jaded writer Crispin Herschey (who surely must be based on Christopher Hitchens) are very entertaining and again, for most writers tying show more the stories of Holly, Hugo and Crispin together would be enough

Thirdly his discussion of invasion of Iraq through the device of a reporter, with his head and heart still on the combat fields, talking to friends and relatives at a wedding, is simply a brilliant device. And fourthly of course the reader can have fun spotting all the references to Mitchell's previous books. My personal favourite was the "Thousand Autumns" Chinese restaurant that turns up early on

But there's also the irritating side. Half way through page 1 we have the teenage Holly Sykes in 1982 wishing that "someone can invent a phone that we can talk to people all the time". Its this sort of too clever by half stuff that has me grinding my teeth. As if any teenager in 1982 would think that. Then we have the deep and meaningfulness, in this case focused on the experience of aboriginal convicts on Rottenest Island off the coast of Western Australia, and yes it was terrible, and they were viciously treated, but its clear that Mitchell only has a cursory understanding of it

And then of course there are the supernaturals. The Horologists vs The Anchorites. And whilst not generally a fan of this type of fantasy writing, I eventually warmed to the generally dull but worthy Horologists over the rather more lively Anchorites (especially as the Anchorites contain several beings we've met before) but I really just don't see the point of it. There is no point in criticising - you are either into fantasy writing or your not, but it was entertaining enough

Oh and the ending, whilst not as preposterous as Jacob de Zoet, leaves a lot to be desired

You can't accuse Mitchell of lacking ambition or having not having outstanding technical skills. And there's much in this that I enjoyed a lot. It just didn't quite work as a whole for me. Perhaps for his next book he should attempt something with a little less range 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