English novelist David Mitchell has been known to tailor to everyone’s taste, be it traditionalist, postmodernist, realist or fantasist. A superb writer and storyteller, he understands how to please his readers. As he stated in an interview in The New Yorker, “One of the questions I always try to keep in the front of mind is to ask why anyone would want to read this, and try to find a positive answer for that. 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.”
Mitchell’s sixth novel is certainly that. The Bone Clocks is written in a similar form to Mitchell’s most famous novel, Cloud Atlas, with six interrelated narratives that stretch from 1984 to 2043. In and of itself, each is a short novel with depth and precision in its characterization that manages to construct a full picture when it comes together with its counterparts.
The plot is complex, intriguing and filled with hundreds of threads woven together to create one large tapestry. The novel opens in 1984 with Holly Skyes, a teenage runaway, and ends sixty years later in the far west of Ireland, where Holly is raising her granddaughter as the world faces environmental and economic collapse. In between, Holly encounters an undergraduate Cambridge sociopath in a Swiss ski resort (1991), has a child with a man more invested in his job as an Iraq War photographer than in his family (2003) and becomes the widowed author of The Radio People (2015). Amidst all this, Holly’s life is disrupted by a slow-moving war between a cult of predatory soul-eaters and a brand of vigilantes led by Doctor Marinus. She finds herself as an unwitting pawn in a war she does not belong in – but she may prove to be its decisive weapon.
Mitchell writes with a furious intensity, a slapped-awake vitality and a delight in language that no new medium can rival. He sees the everyday world with startling freshness, leading to grounded and sarcastic Anglo-Saxon prose that somehow makes room for the supernatural, as if D.H Lawrence had been reborn in this new digital age. It is no coincidence, then, that it was the makers of The Matrix who transformed his previous epic Cloud Atlas into an extraordinary film released in 2012.
There are many reasons why a novel like The Bone Clocks should not be successful. In a section from the point of view of Crispin Hershey, Mitchell even writes, “A book can’t be half fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant.” Yet somehow, in a true testament to Mitchell’s writing abilities, it works. The realism of Holly’s life allows us to glimpse fragments of the world beyond, like a curtain revealing the shadowy figures from an alternative realm.
Overall, this book is a little mad, and like most of Mitchell’s works, it does not fit neatly into a single category. I am sure that many people will ask if this is “serious” literature, but that is not the point. Mitchell’s sentences never give off the sour taste of intellectualism that is found in many genius fiction pieces. Rather, he has always been a writer who understands that the reader wants to be entertained. The Bone Clocks shines brilliantly in this regard.
Booking It: The Bone Clocks
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