The release of David Mitchell’s book The Bone Clocks was quite possibly the most eagerly awaited of the year. Bibliophiles the world over could be found champing at the bit to dig into the latest offering from the author of the brilliant Cloud Atlas as well as the acclaimed Ghostwritten and number9dream. Having dipped his toes into science fiction in the past with visions of a dystopian future in Cloud Atlas, we all could not wait to see how he would deal with a book that promised to be his first all-out fantasy work.
The result? Well… it’s complicated.
The Bone Clocks has two narratives. The first is the tale of Holly Sykes, a teen-runaway turned author who finds that she has the ability to know things that she should not – premonitions of the future and of the present. Much like in Cloud Atlas each chapter is from the POV of a different character but the story is bookended with ones from her viewpoint and every chapter features a different stage in her life through the eyes of other characters that encounter her while on their own journeys.
The second narrative is of a war between two immortal/regenerating groups: the quasi-vampiric Anchorites and the rather Time Lordy Horologists. Until the penultimate chapter these two are kept very separate with the first dominant and the second one teasing us with brief glimpses of narrative leg, filling you with questions and a sense of unease.
This genre-bending is very much Mitchell’s style and this is certainly a novel that has ambitions and pretensions beyond that of almost anything I have read before. Each chapter of the book has its own distinctive flavour, feeling like a mini-novella within the wider narrative, and there are some - the Ed Brubeck and Crispin Hershey chapters in particular - that I felt could have been expanded to be a novel in their own right.
There is also a tremendous sense of humour through the whole story, and this is best shown in the Crispin Hershey chapter. Crispin is a middle-aged author with the selling power of a police box but an ego the size of the inside of a TARDIS. In this chapter Mitchell takes aim at reviewers who barely glance at the book before castigating a book, pretentious authors who refuse to move with the times, and even at his own book: "a book can't be half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half-pregnant".
There is also Mitchell’s trademark of slipping in minor characters from old books into his newer ones. I have a link here to a flow-chart documenting this here. This reuse of characters gives added value to those who have been avid fans of Mitchell for a while and show how this new work fits into the rest of this work.
No writer can weave as complex a tapestry as this quite like Mitchell and it comes so very close to being pulled off. The chief problem that I have with this book though is its length. If a book is going to stretch to over 600 pages then it needs to have a very good reason for doing so, and I am thoroughly unconvinced that this book needed to be so very long. The chief culprits behind this for me are the middle chapters of the story. The chapters concerning Hugo Lamb, Ed Brubeck and Crispin Hershey were indeed good fun to read in of themselves and as I said could easily be expanded on their own into enjoyable novels, but they are all unnecessarily long.
For all of them the parts that advance the over-arching narrative come at the very end of 70-100 page chapters where the bits before seem only to be present to advance you to that point. They are the fat of the book, and though we all know that the fatty bits are always the tastiest, in a book that is borderline obese you feel that perhaps a diet would be more advisable. This book just isn’t particularly tight, with far too much exploration of characters that very soon will be barely referenced again.
The final chapter too really annoyed me. The second facet of the narrative completed, Mitchell takes us into a very bleak future where everything has gone disastrously wrong and proceeds to waste 40 pages of my time on something that should have been a short epilogue. The ending was sweet, but getting there was one hell of a slog. The author’s concerns for the future of humanity are well documented, but this felt very much bolted on – an appendix adding little but additional weight and the potential to irritate.
It’s all very well saying that these are enjoyable and well written, but if a part of a book is not relevant to what the story is trying to achieve, then it should be removed – especially true in a brick like The Bone Clocks. Much like The Goldfinch, I think this is a case of cowardly editing and an over-powerful author preventing some painful, yet necessary weight-shedding.
These problems aside, there is no doubt that Mitchell has achieved something truly remarkable in this book. My problems listed above could all have been solved so very easily with better editorial discipline – which part of the reason why it is so maddening to me – and do not in any sense detract from what is a very good novel. Mitchell is surely one of the great authors currently writing, and this book thoroughly deserved its longlisting for the Man Booker, though equally its omission from the shortlist.
7.5/10
Favourite Quotes
“Love's pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.”
“He was doing quite well until the last sentence, but if you bare your arse to a vengeful unicorn, the number of possible outcomes dwindles to one.”
“This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator.”
“Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers.”
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