The Bone Clocks (2014)
Three and half Stars out of Five
David Mitchell
624 pages
David Mitchell is the author of six books, the most acclaimed
of which is “Cloud Atlas”. “The Bone
Clocks” like Cloud Atlas was well received critically and was on the nomination
list for the Man Booker prize. The two books share a number of similarities: construction, characters, themes, stylistic writing to name a few. And one
other concept they have in common is a blurring of the lines between literary genres.
This book could be classed as drama, epic, fantasy/science fiction, or even religious.
Like “Cloud Atlas” the story is told in six parts: 1984
England, 1991 Switzerland, 2004 Iraq and England, 2015-20 New York and England,
2025 New York, and 2043 Ireland. In 1984 we are introduced to fifteen year old
Holly Sykes and her precocious six year old brother Jacko. Holly lives a working
class life with her family in Gravesend where she is in perpetual adolescent/parent conflict with her mother. Following a divisive fight with her “Mam”, Holly runs away
and in so doing starts the novel on its way into regions of fantasy and the
mundane. Holly lives in a world where an unseen war is taking place, and she is
about to become a minor pawn in that war.
Holly like her soon to be missing brother Jacko has some peculiar
characteristics. In Holly’s case, she hears voices (the Radio People) and sometimes
sees people that go unseen and unheard by others; a Miss Constantine has an unnerving
tendency to show up at the foot of Holly’s bed late at night, for example. The
novel tells the story of the aforementioned unseen war between the Anchorites
and the Horologists. Like Cloud Atlas there are few greys in this war. Miss
Constantine and her fellow Anchorites are "vampires" of a sort, while the
Horologists (the Good Guys) are represented by one of Mitchell’s recurring
characters, Marius. The Anchorites feed in peculiar way off mortals like Holly who have some
psychic powers (remember, she hears voices) in order to maintain their youth.
The Horologists on the other hand have a different mechanism for living
forever; a mechanism that appears to be based on luck rather than merit or
vampirism. In any event, they take umbrage at the Anchorites’ method and thus
ensues the war.
Mitchell employs very sophisticated stylistic touches in describing
his characters. In the case of the fifteen year old Holly for example, she of
the working class English countryside, Mitchell has Holly speaking a British
vernacular that had me using my Kindle-embedded dictionary on a quite frequent
basis. In a later, overly long section of the book, he has Crispin Hershey as
an English member of the Literati deliver a couple lectures on how to write
creative fiction. Or in the section on Holly’s childhood friend, now war
correspondent and husband, Ed Brubek, the narrative goes into some detail on
the life of a war correspondent in Iraq. Each of the sections is carefully written
with a lot of attention given to the style of the speaker – all are told in the
first person narrative form. But here there is a bit of a problem: even though,
each person speaks the patois of their character and time, they all speak with
a too-informed cleverness that makes each speaker sound essentially like the other.
On the issue of character evolution, we have the opportunity
to really test Mitchell’s abilities with the case of Holly. We see her age from
a rebellious fifteen year old to a twenty-two year old bar maid to a young
mother/novelist to a middle aged mother (where she is finally told the details
of the war) to finally as aged grandmother who must make a tough decision.
Sure, there are verbal changes that take place over this spectrum of her life
stages. But she seems at seventy-six quite nearly the same person she was at
twenty-two. All the scars and experiences of her life seem to have left little
impression on her character, her morals, or her values.
The book is constructed cleverly in many ways. The central
nature of the war between the Anchorites and the Horologists is not clearly
laid out until about two thirds of the way into the book. I enjoy watching
characters and stories being unpeeled by authors in this manner, and Mitchell
is expert at doing this in “The Bone Clocks”. But what of the underlying
message in this book? Is Holly’s path through life and her commitment to her
progeny the point of the book, is the examination of the various characters,
good and bad the message, or is the background story of the warring immortals
the lesson? In the case of Holly or that of the secondary characters, there is strength
in this book. Mitchell is great at telling the little stories within his books,
the stories that help propel the bigger story arc. His characters are witty and
often fun to read about, but not I think his big point. If it is the war
between the two sets of immortals, the science fiction-like cosmology of these
two sides makes little sense from a scientific point of view; one is forced
into a religiously inspired fantasy view instead.
The re-incarnation aspects of “The Bone Clocks” appeared in “Cloud
Atlas” as allusions; in “The Bone Clocks”, they appear as outright facts. It makes
me wonder if Mitchell sees an importance in the concept of re-cycled lives ala
the Hindus. His books frequently have conflicts driven by bullies versus the
innocent; the entire last section of The Bone Clocks emphasizes this point in a
post-apocalyptic vision of Ireland. Thus, Man’s initial and maybe most basic
temperament is that of the bully. Some people evolve as they live their lives
and become someone higher, someone good. It’s a good concept: evolution towards
a higher moral plane. It would be nice if true. In any event, “The Bone Clocks”
is a good read, but not, I think David Mitchell’s best – certainly “Cloud Atlas”
is better with its grander vision of the world.
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