The Bone Clocks
Why I read this book
This is my 4th Mitchell novel, having read Cloud Atlas, Ghostwritten, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet before this. He might be the best writer I’ve read currently writing in English – blending an entertainer’s flourish for narrative and the stylistic virtuosity of a “serious” fiction writer.
Summary
The Bone Clocks is grouped into six novellas circling the same characters and world, set to a backdrop of a gods and men final brawl between immortal atemporals in the Horologists, immortal by birthright, and the Anchorites, acolytes of the Shaded Way who nourish their immortality by “decanting” the souls of those with some psychosoteric ability – soul vampires. The first narrative follows Holly Sykes as a child running away from home, the second jumps to Hugo Lamb, an overly-smart Cambridge student on a vacation to the Swiss Alps and who dalliances with Holly Sykes. The third narrative follows Ed Brubeck, husband to Holly Sykes and foreign war reporter caught between his love of family and his compulsion to live life on the edge. After Brubeck, we get fading author Crispin Hershey, a facsimile of Martin Amis, David Mitchell, and perhaps Salman Rushdie, as his career hurdles towards oblivion. Again, his narrative hinges on Holly, as they develop a friendship after Holly has published her book Radio People to great acclaim. In the penultimate narrative, we occupy Marinus’s world, an ancient atemporal currently living in the body of a psychiatrist, as she and her fellow atemporals gear up for the final showdown with the soul vampires. In the last narrative, we return to an elderly Holly Sykes as the world has descended into climate crisis and on the cusp of regression back to the Stone Ages.
How was the book
Most people have rendered some version of the following thought after reading more than a few Mitchell novels: is there anything he can’t do? The Bone Clocks is a cinder block of a novel, my version’s odometer clocking in at a voluminous 624. The plot revolves around Holly Sykes, first as a wayward child acting the part of a rebellious youth and running away from home, then four more narratives that helix-like intersperse with Holly’s life, before finally returning to an elderly Holly Sykes. Mitchell buffets the narrative with his typically mealful prose. He is that rare virtuoso of both style and narrative; The Bone Clocks showcases him at his best, from the the feng shui of the six neatly nested matryoshka-like novellas, to the visceral and bodily styles of his metaphor: “cheekbones you’d slice your thumb on”, laughs like “a sequence of glottal stops, like the noise a body might make as it falls down wooden stairs into a basement”.
That isn’t to say everything here is great. The penultimate section depicts a psychosoteric battle between the big bad, the Anchorites, soul vampires who feed their immortality on the blood “decanted” from those who showcase some mental superpowers, and the magnanimous and ageless Horologists, who have “immortality as a birthright” who are trying to defeat the Anchorites, a scene that might uncharitably be read like an MCU fan-fic.
Seeing my dead body against the wall, the Anchorites reason that no psychosoteric can now attack them, and their red shield flickers out. They’ll pay for this mistake. Incorporeally, I pour psychovoltage into a neurobolas and kinetic it at our assailants. It smacks into Imhoff and Westhuizen, the Fifth and Seventh Anchorites, respectively, and down they go. Three against seven. I ingress into Arkady to help him repair the shield, which turns a stronger blue and pushes back the remaining Anchorites. When Arkady glances back at Ōshima, however, I see his fight is lost. His body is evaporating as we look. Go to Holly, suborders Arkady. I obey without even thinking to bid him goodbye, an omission I regret even as I transverse to Holly, ingress, evoke an Act of Total Suasion, and … Now what?
Despite this brief departure, a turn that might not suit Mitchell’s talents as well as other styles (is laser beam shooting action an answer to this review’s initial question?), the denouement of the novel returns to the immensely personal reality of life, a now elderly Holly Sykes forced to live in a world that never beat climate change, to a world on the cusp of becoming a hellscape of barbarism, and returning to Mitchell the reins he is much more capable of wielding: exceptionally well-crafted dialogue, perfect pacing, and a fine eye for the twitches of humanity that enfleshes his characters.
While most of Mitchell’s work defies genre, The Bone Clocks might be said to occupy that rarefied place of literary science fiction, and he has more than a passing similarity to writers like Marukami, Ishiguro, or Rushdie, all of whom have to varying degrees embraced the fantastic in their fiction. The Bone Clocks represents the most concentrated dive for Mitchell into the fantastic. In the past, the ethereal occupied a “tree in a school play” role in his fiction, but The Bone Clocks is almost entirely foregrounded with this otherworldly-ness, sometimes drowning the humanity of his fully realized characters. The way Mitchell adds in this psychic showdown between immortals feels almost like when Bob Ross would draw a gigantic tree in the middle of his painting with two minutes left in an episode, painting over the painstakingly rendered bushes and trees and rocks and shorelines, and there is nothing that makes the literati more squeamish than a science fiction or fantasy plot. Perhaps we can call it magical realism, and perhaps this is another thing in the ever-growing list of things Mitchell can do in the (definitely not) dead novel.
Favorite quotes
A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warned. (390)
I put my hand on the altar rail. “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 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 Marshmallow” 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 …” (35)
Any other reading
Anything else by Mitchell