The Bone Clocks feels like it might be the book David Mitchell has been building to since the beginning of his career as a novelist. In books like Ghostwritten (his first) and Cloud Atlas (his best), Mitchell has woven globe-hopping, history-spanning narratives of interconnection, staking his claim in the daring notion that we are all—across time, across space, across culture—reading from the same script. But in his new book, he’s finally managed to tell a story that backs up the claim.
Structurally, The Bone Clocks is similar to both Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas. Like those earlier novels, The Bone Clocks is presented as a series of novellas, each written in the unique voice of a different character, in a different part of the world, at a different time in human history. The book begins with Holly Sykes, a British teen in 1984, who runs away from home after a blow-up with her mother over her boyfriend. Soon, she washes up with a band of migrant workers at a local fruit farm—but not before reporting a lot of what she calls “Holly Sykes Weird Shit,” including a childhood ability to see the future, an imaginary friend who may actually be a ghost, reanimated corpses, body-swapping consciousnesses, telekinetic battles, and an episode of memory erasure that prevents her from recalling the whole thing after it’s done.
As in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, the beginning narrative ends at a moment of crisis and the novel skips years ahead—to tell the story of an amoral Cambridge scholar named Hugo Lamb, from there to an Iraq war correspondent, and a self-absorbed British novelist, and so on, past our own present and into a speculative dystopian future. This should sound familiar to fans of Cloud Atlas, which linked its disparate narratives with a series of casual linkages—a diary written here pops up here, and a piece of music written in one place and time resurfaces in another. (That, and the suggestion that the characters were a single soul transmigrating through history.)
In The Bone Clocks, however, the connection between each section is anything but casual. In their turn, each comes back to revolve around Holly Sykes, and the “Weird Shit” that happened to her in the first section begins to reveal itself as a meta-narrative linking the individual narratives of Mitchell’s characters: One Plot to Rule Them All. That this Plot turns out to be a sci-fi/fantasy escapade taken straight from the pages of Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Susannah Clarke will please some and irk others—I loved it. Ultimately, the meta-narrative Mitchell reveals has to do with an ancient war between two bands of immortals, the good Horologists and the evil Anchorites, and consciousnesses that wander between bodies, and holes in space-time summoned from thin air, and pitched telekinetic battles, and ancient mystical temples, and…
But enough. I could give away the plot right here, but one of the great pleasures of Mitchell’s novel is discovering what’s truly going on for yourself. In previous novels, the web binding Mitchell’s disparate narratives to each other was largely thematic: a recurring motif of struggle throughout history, of humanity’s persistent inhumanity to one another and to the world that we share. Those almost musical thematic echoes are present in The Bone Clocks as well—but ultimately, Mitchell’s triumph in his new book is to make these themes of interconnection and echo explicit by uniting his characters in a single coherent narrative.
To be sure, The Bone Clocks is not without its flaws. The paranormal aspects of the story work best when they are still mysterious, when the appearance of unexplained phenomena are portents of a big payoff—a payoff that, when it comes, turns out to be a bit silly, and clumsy in its execution. And though the story it tells is more purely pleasurable than the one told in Cloud Atlas, the former novel is more successful as a stylistic exercise, so distinct are the voices of each section.
Still, The Bone Clocks feels like a watershed novel—an important book both in the career of David Mitchell and in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Mitchell is among the most acclaimed of our living literary geniuses, known for his mastery of the language, of multivalent styles and voices, and as a masterful architect of meaning, revealing in his web of stories the way we live now and the ways we might live into an uncertain future. With his newest book, Mitchell adds pure readerly pleasure to these areas of proficiency. The Bone Clocks may be his masterpiece—or maybe not.
But it certainly is a lot of fun to read.
