The Bone Clocks

Glimpses Of The Future

When readers start on David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, they get into the working class Irish world of Holly Sykes, an angry young woman who is cruelly dumped by her boyfriend. She has already fought with her mother and left home, so can't go back.

From such an ordinary opening, the book goes into a maze of multiple narratives, romance, fantasy, sci-fi and doomsday scenarios. By the end Holly Sykes is seen as an elderly grandmother in a remote village in Ireland, looking after two kids. It is a dark future in 2043, when today's excesses have rendered the world short of electricity, water, food, and helplessly dominated by the Chinese.

In between, other characters enter and exit, secret cults have dangerous to-the-death battles, and somehow Holly Sykes is involved, either directly or peripherally.

There are a thousand twists and turns, and unless one is peeking at pages to come, there is no way of predicting what will happen next.

David Mitchell spins a seductive web over the novel's 600 odd pages, and never lets the pace or inventiveness flag. He blends his real and fantasy narratives seamlessly to create a bookwhich is sprawling in his reach, and always a few steps ahead of the reader's anticipation. But he never takes the reader's attention of patience for granted. He is quoted as having said in an interview, "One of the questions I always try to keep in the front of my mind is to ask why would anyone want to read this, and to try to find a positive answer for that. People’s time, if you bought it off them, is expensive. Someone’s going to give you eight or ten hours of their life. I want to give them something back, and I want it to be an enjoyable experience.”

Like his earlier book Cloud Atlas, this one too has six interconnected tracks that move from 1984 to 2043.  Linked to Holly Sykes are Hugo Lamb, a greedy, nasty Cambridge undergraduate; Crispin Hershey, a successful English writer who is suffering from writer's block, Ed Brubeck a war correspondent with whom Holly has a child. 

When she was younger, Holly heard voices and had visions; as an adult she still goes into occasional trances that frighten people around her. She doesn't know how, but she is linked to two warring groups of immortals-- the Horologists and the Anchorites. 

When she had run away from home, she had encountered a strange old woman, Esther Little, who made the strange declaration that she may need “asylum” if “the First Mission fails.”  When she was seven, Holly was treated by Dr Marinus, a Chinese child psychiatrist to cure her of her mental "Radio People."  These characters return in various incarnations; there are others who help Holly never to be heard of again-- like her co-worker at a strawberry farm; or the horrid critic against whom Crispin Hershey launches a vicious revenge for writing a career-destroying review of his book.

Mitchell has as much fun with his stories and his characters as the reader he so clearly wants to engage and entertain. Some characters, like Marinus not just take different forms in this book, he appears from Mitchell's earlier novels.

The portion in the middle, where the Horologists and Anchorites battle it out is a bit juvenile and video game-ish, with dialogue using sci-fi gobbledygook, but get past it and the book finds its steady, grown-up feet again and ends with a flourish.

The Bone Clocks

By David Mitchell

Publisher: Random House

Pages: 640