With The Bone Clocks, Mitchell rises to meet and match the legacy of Cloud Atlas. The novel tells the story of Holly Sykes' life in six episodes while also, surprisingly, linking his books set in 20th-century England, 18th-century Japan and various far futures … As a central character, Holly is an odd amalgam. The glimpses of the supernatural universe surrounding her are effaced from her consciousness, so she has no curiosity about them, no yearning to reach or understand them, no quest. She lives a very human life, with loves, losses and achievements, which is heroic on its own … In The Bone Clocks, interconnected lives stretch across time; human contact is both frightening and vital. This novel electrifyingly unites Mitchell's fictions into one universe while telling the story of Holly Sykes, an ordinary young woman whose chance encounters give her life meaning.
Mitchell unfolds Holly’s larger story from the 1990s to the 2050s through narrators who are each directly linked to her...These intensely told, brightly imagined sequences are riddled with the sudden entry and exit of shadowy characters who are keenly interested in Holly and given to making crazy declarations … Holly and reader alike at last learn more definitively about the theological origins and the time, space and logic-defying nature of the labyrinthine conflict that has surrounded her, claimed her little brother (who is more than just her little brother) and invaded her consciousness and very being for decades … This all must sound ridiculous, exhausting, cheaply exciting and dangerously lowbrow and yes, by every measure it is, save one: David Mitchell has written it.
Pure storytelling seems to have triumphed here; the human case has disappeared. The novel keeps producing iterations of itself, in different places and times—England in the nineteen-eighties, Iraq in 2004, America in 2025, post-apocalyptic Ireland in 2043—but instead of formal capability there is a sense of empty capacity. It hardly helps that threaded through the book is a science-fiction plot about warring bands of immortals, named the Horologists and the Anchorites. Weightless realism is here at slack odds with weightless fantasy … Mitchell has written a theological novel of sorts, and just as certain kinds of theology threaten to rob human life of intrinsic significance—since theology exists to convert worldly meaning into transcendent meaning—so Mitchell’s peculiar cosmology turns his characters into time-travelling groundlings, Horology’s dwarves.
Mr. Mitchell is able to scamper nimbly across decades of Holly’s life, using his prodigious gifts as a writer to illuminate the very different chapters of her story. Like a wizard tapping his wand here and there, he turns on the lights in a succession of revealing little dioramas … Mr. Mitchell’s heavy arsenal of talents is showcased in these pages: his symphonic imagination; his ventriloquist’s ability to channel the voices of myriad characters from different time zones and cultures; his intuitive understanding of children and knack for capturing their solemnity and humor; and his ear for language — its rhythms, sounds and inflections. But while those gifts are more vibrant than ever, Mr. Mitchell’s writing has also become increasingly self-indulgent. The Bone Clocks is a novel desperately in need of an editor.
From the first sentences of The Bone Clocks, you know you’re in David Mitchell Land. Fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes, ill-treated by a boyfriend and furious with her mother, runs away from home in 1984. We hear the ‘dozy-cow voice’ of a woman she encounters. We watch sea gulls ‘scrawking for chips.’ We see how ‘the wind unravels clouds from the chimneys of the Blue Circle factory, like streams of hankies out of a conjurer’s pocket.’ As ever, Mitchell writes a crunchily grounded, bitingly Anglo-Saxon prose that somehow makes room for the supernatural, as if D. H. Lawrence were reborn for the digital age … Not many novelists could take on plausible Aboriginal speech, imagine a world after climate change has ravaged it and wonder whether whales suffer from unrequited love...Other writers may be more moving, and some may push deeper, but very few excite the reader about both the visceral world and the visionary one as Mitchell does.
For diehard Mitchell fans, The Bone Clocks is another six-part, globe-trotting, time-traveling performance in literary ventriloquism. For the unconverted, it offers everything you could possibly want from a conjurer at the height of his powers—a ludicrously ambitious, unstoppably clever epic told through a chorus of diverse narrators that is both outrageous in scope and meticulous in execution … As characters from Cloud Atlas and earlier novels accumulate throughout the story, you begin to wonder whether The Bone Clocks is a mere sequel or perhaps a larger vessel. Mitchell has said that this novel is a keystone in a project that spans his entire fictional output—an ‘uber-book.’ The modern master of Russian-nesting-doll novels has suggested that each of his novels are little porcelain babushkas hiding inside Mitchell’s meta-Russian-nesting-doll oeuvre, all along.
This new novel offers up a rich selection of domestic realism, gothic fantasy and apocalyptic speculation, stretching around the world from the Margaret Thatcher era of the 1980s to the Endarkenment of 2043 … We climb this steep mountain expecting that we will be rewarded with the wizardry of The Night Circus, The Magicians or Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell — but somehow, as The Bone Clocks winds up for its long-anticipated climax, Mitchell abandons his exploration of character, sexuality, class and politics for an old warlock’s sack of cliches. In the words of one of the book’s courageous, jargon-laden soldiers, the ‘psychovoltage is low.’
I find these radical shifts of time and person difficult, and, though willing to suspend disbelief, am uncertain when to do so. Am I to believe in the hocus-pocus of the secret cult of the Blind Cathar in the same way I am to believe in the realistic portrayal of the death agonies of corporate capitalism – or should I believe in them in different ways? How many novels is it? If it is one, I just don't see how it hangs together … For all the stuff and nonsense about escaping mortality by switching bodies and devouring souls, death is at the heart of this novel. And there lies its depth and darkness, bravely concealed with all the wit and sleight of hand and ventriloquistic verbiage and tale-telling bravura of which Mitchell is a master.
With one very important exception (which I’ll get to shortly), the six novellas that make up The Bone Clocks take place on the margins of a grand, cosmic struggle, and explore the lives of the people who reside there … This fifth section, however, belongs entirely to the immortals, and the novel frankly suffers for it, particularly because Mitchell plants a stylistic belly-flop into one of the more egregious cases of Sci-Fi technobabble you are likely to witness this side of a Star Trek fan-fiction site … There is a moment in the very last pages–you will definitely know it when you get there–where Mitchell reaches right into your chest, puts his fingers on your heart, and presses down. The kind of moment you would choose to live inside for all eternity, if you had to pick just one.
The overall goal here seems to be a favorite Mitchell theme — the eternal interconnectedness of people — but it comes at the expense of poor Holly, who is young at the story's outset and old at its end. She is the book's heart. But after the first chapter, we don't hear about her inner life again until a truly irrelevant postscript … A New York Times profile recently suggested we think of Mitchell's body of work as a ‘macronovel,’ with parts that have yet to reveal themselves — and so maybe the information overload of this book will illuminate some later work. Taken as a single volume, though, it registers simply as overload.
You can tell Mitchell is pursuing Grand Themes because of his aggressive capitalization: The Schism, The Second Mission. But I’m not clever enough to understand exactly what those themes are. I think maybe he wants to get us thinking about the ways that minds can intersect each other, the ways that consciousness can be shared … What goes wrong? In part, The Bone Clocks falls apart in the same way all supernatural and horror stories fall apart: It shows the monster, and once it shows the monster, everything becomes less sinister, and more ludicrous. In Cloud Atlas, the mystery remained off-screen, subtle and spooky...The Bone Clocks is explicit: The various neurological techniques of the immortals are described in precise and tedious detail. Its villains are comic-book-evil.
If you've read Cloud Atlas, then you know that what happens in a David Mitchell novel is often wild and complicated, and completely unexpected. This is true of his latest book, which is broken up into six sections, all of which loop back and around to give us another decade in the life of the book's main character, Holly Sykes … Time keeps pulsing ahead in The Bone Clocks, and Mitchell pushes his cast of characters into the future, ending the book in a terrifying world. But for all the dystopia, and the mysticism, and the wild and clanging noise, and the flights of invention that have taken place in this extraordinary fun house of a novel, Mitchell's novel-writing rules allow him to retain his great sensitivity toward his main character from start to finish.
Maybe three-quarters of this sizeable text is well written and captivating. Holly Sykes, a sort of main character who narrates the first section, is headstrong, honest, and utterly likeable. Following an argument with her mother, she runs away from home and right into a battle that makes approximately zero sense to the reader. Mitchell’s prose is often so deft and appropriate that one has to wonder why he would spoil it with garbled, rambling accusations, unfamiliar names, and capitalized words … Mitchell’s strength lies in chronicling the experiences of people—humans—who live and die and love in between. His insistence on threading an ungainly carpet of half-digital, half-mystical magic is puzzling, especially when it is so unnecessarily complex.
Mitchell divides up the novel by narrator and genre, including literary farce, fantasy, and post-apocalyptic. Holly narrates the first and last section, three men in her life get the middle three, and then there’s the next-to the last section, which is the book’s most problematic. With that one asterisk, Mitchell pulls them all off with aplomb and ample showmanship, tossing off one beautiful line after another … To get hung up on the fifth section’s flaws would be to ignore hundreds of pages of ambitiously creative work and outstanding writing. And if The Bone Clocks might be a little messy, I’d rather re-read it than a too-tidy novel with less on its mind.
Mitchell has a fondness for literary puzzles and narrative sleights of hand, and part of the great fun of The Bone Clocks lies in trying to ascertain each narrator’s connection to Holly … Characters in The Bone Clocks speak of being part of — of writing themselves into — ‘the Script,’ some sort of underlying principle that governs reality and connects people, places and events across vast distances in time and space. The locution might strike some readers as so much metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, but it’s actually quite apt. Mitchell relishes the act of creation, of devising a script for his characters to follow, of revealing the patterns of behavior that underlie humanity. He’s a master of adopting drastically different perspectives and voices, extracting the stories his characters only tell themselves in the deepest parts of their consciousnesses.
Is The Bone Clocks the most ambitious novel ever written, or just the most Mitchell-esque? … From gritty realism to far-out fantasy, each section has its own charm and surprises. With its wayward thoughts, chance meetings, and attention to detail, Mitchell's novel is a thing of beauty.
