The Bone Clocks

The Bone Clocks (2014)
by David Mitchell

Full disclosure: I'm a little bit in love with David Mitchell. The Bone Clocks was one of the first books I read this year and it's still one of my favourites. Then I read the equally fantastic Cloud Atlas. Then I went to hear David Mitchell speak at the Auckland Writers Festival in May and he was articulate, inspiring and completely charming. I went out immediately and bought four books purely because he mentioned them in passing (Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, a book of Philip Larkin poems and a couple of Ursula Le Guin novels). He is one of the best novelists around and The Bone Clocks is an absolute masterpiece.


David Mitchell gesticulating wildly and generally being awesome in Auckland.

Much like Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks is uniquely structured, in six loosely-linked parts that also work independently as six quite different short stories. Each part of the novel covers a different time in the life of main character Holly Sykes, beginning in 1984 with Holly at 15 years old and ending in 2044 with Holly now an elderly woman, having lived a very eventful life.
Each part of The Bone Clocks is set in a different time, in a different part of the world and follows a different character (Holly appears in every part of the book, but only the first and last parts are told from her point of view). Not only that, but each part of The Bone Clocks is even written in a completely different genre, covering everything from YA to literary satire to hard-hitting war story to fantasy/science fiction to cautionary post-apocalyptic fable. It's an incredibly ambitious thing to do with a novel, and David Mitchell pulls it off spectacularly - not only can he write in six different genres, but he can write very, very well in all six of them.

This is totally not what we mean by "Bone Clock", but it's kind of cool anyway.

Despite the large changes in style from one part to another, The Bone Clocks reads as one very large-scale novel and never seems disjointed or awkward. Each part adds another layer to our understanding of Holly and the world around her, as well as further developing the sci-fi/fantasy storyline of the Anchorites, which subtly carries through in the background of each part before emerging in its full glory in the (somewhat controversial) fifth part, which is a fully-fledged celebration of the most out-there type of fantasy writing. There are immortal, multi-dimensional, soul-stealing time vampires and all sorts of other goings-on that you would not normally expect to find in a critically-acclaimed novel long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. It is absolutely mental and really shouldn't work (and to be fair, a number of critics have argued that it doesn't work, including the nice old lady sitting next to me at the Writers Festival) but it provides an insane, ambitious and glorious centrepiece for the book that makes it completely different to anything you've ever read before.

Apparently there are also a number of minor characters in The Bone Clocks who have appeared in earlier David Mitchell novels. I've only read two of his books so far, so can't really comment except to say that this makes me really motivated to go back and read all of these other books. It would seem that each novel on its own wasn't quite complex enough for David Mitchell, so he felt the need to intertwine elements from all of the books into each other, turning the whole thing into one enormous, ridiculous uber-novel. It's kind of a glorious project to redefine the way that books are meant to work.

It's four different books, but it's also one book. Kind of. 

Aside from the his ability to create a uniquely structured masterpiece of a novel, David Mitchell is a fantastic writer with a particular talent for characters and a remarkable way with words. Even when he's writing about dramatically misunderstood fifteen-year-olds or immortal super-villains, he does it beautifully : "Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul" or "Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you... No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same" or "Persuasion is not about force; it's about showing a person a door, and making him or her desperate to open it". The Bone Clocks is over 600 pages of perfectly constructed sentences, but the storylines are so absorbing that you don't even notice how good the writing is.

Here's another quote from The Bone Clocks - this one was so good, someone printed it out in fancy gold text.

I could talk for hours about The Bone Clocks and how much I loved this book, but I think the main reason I enjoyed it so much was that I knew absolutely nothing about it beforehand and I would hate to spoil that for anyone else. Just know that it's absolutely spectacular and you should read this book immediately.

10/10