The Bone Clocks: A Novel

David Mitchell's latest novel is a force of nature. Reading The Bone Clocks felt like unraveling a puzzle overseen by some omnipresent, all-seeing Oz. Or maybe a more apt description is holding a nautilus in your hand, noting its whorls that make up the whole breathing creature that is the universe of the book. It just keeps growing on you... Read and relish this book slowly. Don't speed read. Linger. I'm a fast reader, but I took my sweet time with this one. There are multitudes and tonalities here that emerge like time lapse photography of something growing, expanding.Mitchell is best known as a master prose stylist known for his genre-bending writing. With The Bone Clocks, he doesn't pull off the literary triple axle so much as a gruelingly satisfying relay race, where several characters take over narration at junctures to carry the story forward. Cloud Atlas, which everyone seems to want to compare The Bone Clocks to, is much more acrobatic, bending not only in place and time but literary narrative styles, each chapter its own standalone novella. In contrast, The Bone Clocks feels more grounded, coherent, like a conventional book, even with its jagged mix of realism and fantasy. In many ways, The Bone Clocks felt like a more fluid, mature Cloud Atlas; just as Cloud Atlas was a more fluid and mature Ghostwritten. The say that ambitious writers write the same novel over and over again to improve it with each new book. Mitchell has done that and more with The Bone Clocks.The Bone Clocks is similar to Cloud Atlas in its six-part structure that plays the scales from naive past to dark, uncertain future, but events are distilled within the lifetime of one character, Holly Sykes. Unlike Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks has a clear protagonist in Holly, though she isn't always our narrator. In the beginning of the book, we meet Holly as a hard-headed teenager living in Kent in Thatcher-era 1980s and by the end of the book, as a fiercely protective grandmother living in Ireland in an apocalyptic 2040s. During most of her life, though, we only get glimpses of her through the first-person eyes of other characters--four others in total. This may seem jarring but it actually works movingly because we discover and get to know Holly from all these different tangents, seeing and experiencing her life without being inside her head. This gives the storytelling a cinematic quality because you are watching Holly through her impact and influence on others. Distance and intimacy.Expect a lot of globe-trotting. Across the span of 600-plus pages, Mitchell takes you to towns and cities like Gravesend, New York City, the Hudson Valley, Toronto, Vancouver, Shanghai, Cartagena, as well as grabs your hand and darts across Iceland, Switzerland, Russia, Australia, and Iraq. Along with a strong sense of place (Mitchell could be a travel writer, seriously), there is a strong sense of time as well. Past, present, and future are represented here both in the propulsive, forward-moving main narrative and in the memories and recollections of various characters.And that's just the human world of temporality. Because, of course, Mitchell doesn't just create worlds, he creates a whole other universe in the creation of two groups of immortals or Atemporals: the Horologists and Anchorites. The Horologists are immortal by default. They live out their lives like mortals, die, and then return forty-nine days in a body whose soul has departed, usually a child, and usually a child with exceptional psychic sensitivities. The Anchorites, on the other hand, are immortal through a kind of soul-eating cannibalism that recalls the recent book Doctor Sleep by Stephen King and the horror-stylings of Clive Barker. These baddies hunt down these special children and "decant" their souls. Mortals are their quarry; good ole Horologists try to stop them. It is a very black-and-white, good-versus-evil kind of conflict, not very nuanced.When we first get to know the surly teenaged Holly, a First Mission by the Horologists has failed tragically; they are scattered and broken. Later when we see middle-aged Holly, the Horologists try for a Second Mission that leads to a spectacular, climatic siege that made me think of Harry Potter fight scenes. This war plays out in the background, with occasional terrifying forays into reality in the early half of the book, though by the middle and latter half becomes thoroughly embroiled and entwined in our/Holly's world (and her head).More than any idea that comes across in the book are the ideas of ties and kinship. Everything is connected ... is something that permeates all of Mitchell's books. His books may feel vast and humanity small in them but at the heart of his writing--and The Bone Clocks is no exception--people matter. What we experience and decide to do matters. We see this most earnestly in Cloud Atlas where acts of cruelty and kindness have consequences that ripple across time and space. Above the din of the action and plotting, The Bone Clocks is very much a book about action being set into motion by small acts, often unseen and unheard, or sometimes quickly "redacted" from conscious memory, as happens a lot in The Bone Clocks. This gives the book a kind of fairy-tale quality in a way. Consider the fateful early scene where Holly meets an old woman and makes her a promise in exchange for a drink of tea. Or, when a character in his love-smitten state, remarks: "Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you ... No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same." If I explain more about this line it would be egregiously spoiling but know that this undeclared devotion will matter critically later. Then, toward the climax of the book, a labyrinth that we first heard about obliquely in the first few pages makes a big splash.It all ties beautifully together.The Bone Clocks treads this same thematic path of kinship both within the novel but also across all the previous books as well. What many fans will surely find thrilling is that Mitchell creates connections, linking to characters in his previous novels, most notably Black Swan Green, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Number9 Dream, and Cloud Atlas. There is an actual word for this, unsurprisingly: metalepsis, the "paradoxical transgression of the boundaries between narrative levels or logically distinct worlds." If anyone transgresses with panache, it's certainly Mitchell in The Bone Clocks. As we've seen before, he regularly imports and exports his own props and characters from earlier works, blurring the boundaries of each novel as a self-contained narrative. It is recurrence but not duplication, though, since Mitchell makes his references through ancestry, reincarnation, or a retelling of a character. By the end of The Bone Clocks, the fantasy action has shifted to a more speculative, dystopian bent. While we've moved on from the Atemporal war, Holly is faced with a much more real, tangible threat. It is a disturbing chapter to end with and yet there is a glimmer of hope, as an old friend of Holly makes an appearance to repay a kind act, just as Holly once did. Actions and reactions.The writing itself is Michell-esque. Per usual, if you've read his other novels, Mitchell gives us observational vertigo that offers the smell of London streets, the heat of the Baghdad sun, or even the movements of shadow and light as precious, unforgettable fragments. You will be highlighting or underlining like crazy in The Bone Clocks.There are a few snooty critics from The New Yorker and elsewhere who have blasted The Bone Clocks as a fantasy hack. My inner thug/ardent Mitchell groupie wants to treat those book reviewers to the same fate as Felix Finch in Cloud Atlas or Richard Cheeseman in The Bone Clocks, but the naysayers do have their points ("intricate replications ... but what do they amount to") and they at least acknowledge that Mitchell is a phenomenal storyteller and novelist. I just don't think they really get Mitchell. So yeah he's given us a literary book about an inter-dimensional war between incorporeal shape-shifters who can ingress and egress through our minds and fight each other with incantations fueled by psychovoltage. Um, who can do that? Who can get the hearts of both genre fans and literary fans a-beating?My final grumble: The Bone Clocks should have made the Booker Prize shortlist.

I picked up THE BONE CLOCKS because I read CLOUD ATLAS a few years ago and enjoyed it. I’m certainly glad that I picked up this book because it’s unique, beautiful, and engaging. It crosses genre conventions to tell an amazing story over the course of six novella-ish parts. We start out with this great, angsty teenage character named Holly Sykes and each section of the novel is from the point of view of someone who is important in her life. The different sections of the novel are spaced several years apart which means that we get to see Holly slowly grow old. Some the sections of this novel absolutely blew me away. I can’t remember the last time I read anything so good. But other sections I had mixed feelings about. For this reason I’m going to detail my feelings about each distinct part.WARNING: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS!Part 1 – A Hot Spell: 1984God, I loved this part of the novel. It’s told through the point of view of a teenage Holly Sykes who runs away from home after having a fight with her mother over a boyfriend. Mitchell captures this 1980s slightly obnoxious teenage point of view so well. I sympathize with Holly but I also want her to grow up. And I love that. There are also just enough hints that something supernatural might be going on to intrigue me. This was a great opening for the story.Part 2 – Myrrh Is Mine, Its Bitter Perfume: 1991This section was quite strong as well. What’s really interesting about it is that it’s from the point of view of psychopath/sociopath. Hugo Lamb, the main character of this section, is a university student who scams pretty well everyone around him. I didn’t necessarily realize that Hugo was a psychopath right away and that’s what made the slow realization so compelling. Most of the people who Hugo scams in the beginning aren’t really that nice (they’re mostly his very privileged, very obnoxious classmates) which makes it easier to sympathize with Hugo. I kept expecting him to have a soft spot somewhere like a normal person, but I slowly came to the realization that he wasn’t a normal person (a fact of which he is very aware). The only person who he feels normal emotion for is Holly and that makes the connection more special, somehow. This section was just so intriguing in terms of character – somehow Mitchell had me rooting for a near-psychopath which is no easy feat for an author.Part 3 – The Wedding Bash: 2004I liked this section of the book, but I also felt that it paled a bit when compared with the previous two sections. It’s told from the point of view of Ed Brubeck, Holly’s romantic partner who is a war reporter in Iraq. I liked the story here as well as Ed’s ruminations about the war and the nature of his work. But I didn’t really find his character as intriguing as I did with some of the other characters in the book. He seemed like a mostly nice guy who kept putting himself in dangerous situations without much of a reason. It was hard for me to understand his motivations. That said, I enjoyed seeing Holly and their daughter from Ed’s point of view.Part 4 – Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet: 2015Oh my gosh, this part of the novel was amazing! Crispin Hershey is an arrogant yet lovable novelist who wrote a successful novel several years before the beginning of this section but is now somewhat washed up. Crispin ends up getting to know Holly (who is now middle-aged) and her daughter. This section is Mitchell at his best – sly and satirical, but with a lot of heart. Crispin is this wonderfully well-realized character who sees himself as set upon at every corner when really people cut him more slack than he probably deserves. He’s one of those flawed, human characters who nevertheless sees himself as the hero of his own story. I have nothing negative to say about this section of the novel.Part 5 – A Horologist’s Labyrinth: 2025This is where the novel really falls apart for me. The earlier sections all had underpinnings of fantasy with strange supernatural events making their way into the narrative. In this section, all the hints of the supernatural come together to form a plot that is fully in the fantasy genre. The main character, Marinus, belongs to a secret society of “Horologists” who see themselves as guardians of humanity and who are reincarnated into new bodies when they die. Marinus meets up with Holly and everything gets really freaky really fast.I found Marinus very difficult to connect with as a character. I didn’t feel that she had much of a voice in comparison to the characters in the previous sections who mostly had quite well-defined voices. I couldn’t get much of a sense of who she was as a person or what she wanted out of life despite the narrative’s forays into her previous life. She basically was her role as a Horologist – I didn’t get much of a sense of her personality or desires outside of this role.I also thought that Mitchell just wasn’t that great at writing a straight-up fantasy novel. Let me make myself clear – I read a lot of fantasy novels (you could even say it’s my genre of choice), so I had no problem with the fact that this section had fantastical elements. My problem was with the execution. Mitchell adopts a plain, fast-paced, action-oriented writing style for this section. I think that he probably sees this style as “genre,” but I don’t think it’s a style used in many fantasy novels and for good reason. In most fantasy novels, there is something mystical or whimsical or very detail-oriented and descriptive about the writing style. This is because the narrative has to get the reader to believe in magic and often in a world that is very different from the real one. A plain, fast-paced writing style doesn’t accomplish this feat. When I was reading “A Horologist’s Labyrinth” I often got the feeling that I was reading a fantasy novel with all the magic sucked out of it. The plot was fantasy, but the writing didn’t match. It would have been a good writing style for a thriller, but I don’t think it works for fantasy.The epic showdown at the end of this section was also a pretty big disappointment. In many ways, it’s the climax of the novel, but it also felt like the laziest and most ridiculous part of the novel. I kept thinking: “This is it?! This is what all those little hints in the earlier parts of the book were leading up to?”Part 6 – Sheep’s Head: 2043This part wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. Holly Sykes is the point-of-view character again, but she is now an old woman living in a post-apocalyptic future. I liked her character here although I found it somewhat difficult to reconcile her with the Holly Sykes of the earlier parts of the books. Anyway, Holly’s living in the country and trying to raise her granddaughter and adopted grandson in a world that has fallen apart.There’s nothing that I really hate about this section, but I read a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction and I just kept thinking that I’d read better. I don’t think that Mitchell particularly does anything unexpected or surprising with the genre and for an author who is known for breaking genre conventions, this was a disappointment. It felt like an amazing novel just sort of wound down and fizzled out in the end with this section.So how do I rate this book? I have to admit that it’s a difficult decision. The first four sections of the novel absolutely blew me away. The last two sections were mediocre. It really felt as if I had read two books rather than one (or six). A part of me wants to rate the book five stars for the earlier sections and another part of me wants to rate it three stars for the later sections. I suppose I’ll have to compromise and rate it at four stars. It seems a shame not to give the sort of bold, beautiful, ambitious writing that I saw in the earlier sections five stars, but I don’t feel that book as a whole merits that high a rating.

Immediately ordered another David Mitchell book as soon I finished this one.

Tres beau livre qui fait voyager dans le temps et l'espace. On se laisse entraîner par le récit en ne sachant pas où l'on va. Et c'est très bien fait

The Bone Clocks is a straightforward novel told in an ambitious manner, fragmented much like Cloud Atlas but in a much simpler reader-friendly structure. No hesitation, I was hooked within a few paragraphs. It is astoundingly clever and erudite without ever once calling attention to either of those elements.Mitchell is a literary writer who treats genre, in this case science fiction/fantasy, as an ingredient in his carefully crafted creation. Each word is weighted to create the maximum evocation of a mood, or idea, or plot point. All of the first person narrators are interconnected but have distinct voices, and each is so grounded in their personal reality, that the reader rapidly deduces their circumstances, character and even place in time - The Bone Clocks travels from the early '80s to 2040 - through casual details, slang and references. It is masterfully done exposition . . .Full review at: http://drewrowsome.blogspot.ca/2014/10/the-bone-clocks-improbable-marvels-made.html

Allem voran: Ich bin ein begeisterter David Mitchell-Leser. Angefangen bei seinem Meisterwerk 'Cloud Atlas', welches ich vor über 10 Jahren erst nach der letzten Seite begeistert zur Seite legen konnte, über seine Frühwerke bis zum 2010er 'The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet' habe ich keinen Autoren so begierig verschlungen wie Mitchell. 'The Bone Clocks' bildet da keine Ausnahme. Ich werde hier nicht weiter auf den Inhalt eingehen (es befinden sich keine Spoiler in diesem Review!), es geht um das Leben einer gewissen Holly Sykes mit all seinen Irrungen, Wirrungen und Hoch- und Tiefpunkten.Wer Mitchells Werke kennt, weiß auch, wie er in quasi-postmoderner, fast schon holistischer Weise fast immer die Charaktere um seine Geschichten schwirren lässt wie Motten um das Licht. Dabei wechselt die Perspektive, der Ich-Erzähler, der Fokus mit einer handwerklich beachtlichen Finesse, die er zwischen seinem Erstling 'Ghostwritten' und eben diesem Roman hier, nur noch verfeinert hat. Im Mittelpunkt immer und unverrückbar: die Geschichte, die Idee, Mitchells zentrale Aussage.Was der Leser erhält, sind Perspektiven, die nicht weiter auseinanderliegen könnten. Getrennt durch Raum und auch Zeit, zeigt uns Mitchell universale Fragen aus ganz unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln, wobei es fast zur Nebensache wird, dass eine davon eben ein Kriegsreporter im Nahen Osten ist, ein vom Ruhme abgefallener Erfolgsautor, ein Student der sich auf Stipendium in die Britische Upperclass gaunert oder eben Holly Sykes, der in sich nervöse Ruhepol von 'The Bone Clocks'. Um sie geht es, um sie kreisen all die Charaktere, denen Mitchell mit gewohnter Authentizität und jeder Menge individuellem Charakter das Zepter des "Geschichte-Erzählens" reihum in die Hand legt.'The Bone Clocks' ist genial. Sprang Mitchell in 'Cloud Atlas' noch durch die Jahrhunderte, in 'Ghostwritten' über sämtliche Kontinente und ruhte sich in 'Black Swan Green' in einer winterlichen 'Stand By Me'-Idylle aus, verknüpft er all seine vorherigen Experimente hier zu einem soliden, gleichbleibend anspruchsvollen aber dennoch überraschend flexiblen Grundgerüst, in dem er seiner Geschichte, vor allem aber den teils liebenswerten, teils fragwürdigen oder skurrilen Charakteren freien Lauf lässt. Klar fühlt man sich jedesmal vor den Kopf gestoßen, wenn die Kamera von dem eben erst liebgewonnenen Charakter oder der spannenden Story an der einen Stelle wegfährt, und in einem völlig anderen Leben weiterfilmt. Aber das ist eben Mitchell.Und was er auch (wie immer) zum Stilmittel macht, ist natürlich die literarische Referenz.Gelegenheitsleser erhalten ein komplexe Geschichte.Vielleser & literarisch Bewanderte erhalten eine komplexe Geschichte eingebettet in eine ebenso komplexe Literaturlandschaft.Und Mitchell-Vielleser erhalten darüber hinaus jede Menge kleine Referenzen zu seinen früheren Werken, die hier und da einen Bogen in andere Teile des Mitchell-Universums schlagen. Ich habe mich oft ertappt, wie ich das Buch zur Seite legte und erstaunt feststellte: "Stimmt! Das ist DER Typ aus DEM Buch ... wow!". Zu guter letzt kann Mitchell auch über sich selbst reflektieren und schmunzeln, wenn sein Autoren-Charakter Hershey sich nicht nur über die Ideenlosigkeit von "Autoren-Charakteren" mokiert, sondern selber immer wieder auf die symmetrische Struktur seines ersten großen Erfolgsromanes angesprochen wird (eine klare Referenz zu Mitchells 'Cloud Atlas').FAZIT: wer komplexe Romane mit einer für Einsteiger "experimentell" wirkenden Struktur mag, sich generell die ein oder andere universelle Frage über die großen Geheimnisse des Menschseins zu Gemüte führen will oder ganz einfach wirklich gute geschriebene, charaktergetragene Literatur mag, kann mit David Mitchell nicht falsch liegen. Ein Autor, der seines Gleichen sucht. Ich kann sein nächstes Werk kaum erwarten und dieses hier nur empfehlen.

I admired the rich imagination in the plot as well as the adept creation of all the characters. I think this book could make an interesting movie like Cloud Atlas which I only half understood ( by the way) . So I wonder if it is me or D. Mitchell? Live images might help the narrative evolve and enable the reader/spectator better follow the plot (or not?). It would be rather difficult though to film as the story covers some 60 years and it is a rather complex narrative with one main character throughout but with a few others taking the lead at times. I enjoyed the reading but I must confess I found it often quite confusing. Some times I even felt totally lost...Still I must say that I find it refreshing to read such a book that is so far away from any stereotype.