David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks relies on facile prose and keenly drawn characters to distract the reader from the brief, but recurrent battles between transmigrating, immortal souls who wander in and out of the lives of his six narrators.
Holly Sykes, the ragamuffin rebellious teenage daughter of an Irish mam and East London pub owner, takes off one day towards the sea, intending to shack up with her much older boyfriend. After finding him in bed with her best friend, she keeps heading east, to the marshy tide lands at the mouth of the Thames. This first section, told from her distinct teen-angst perspective in the mid 1980s, full of slang and poor choices, contrasts sharply with the sixth and final section, also narrated by Holly. In 2043, she is a 73 year old arthritic but shrewd grandmother, fighting on the east coast of Ireland to keep her accidental family alive five years after a series of “giga storms” have decimated the electrical grid, the internet, and civilization itself. In between, she pops up in all the other stories, each narrated by a distinct voice.
In 1991, we meet a Cambridge undergrad named Hugo Lamb, a sociopath who inexplicably falls in love with her while on a year end ski trip in Switzerland. Next, we find her partnered in 2004 with Ed Brubeck, who rescued her back in ’84, now a war correspondent with whom she’s had a daughter, Aiofe. She offers him a choice: stay home with them, or return to to the risky life he seems addicted to. This section is written crisply, reflecting Brubeck’s years as a journalist.
Flash forward to 2014-19, and Crispen Hershey (who appeared briefly in the Cambridge scenes two sections earlier) gives us a view through the jaundiced mind and words of a former Wild Child of British letters, whose first novel outshines anything he’s been able to produce since. He falls in and out of love with a Spanish editor, but Holly remains a steadfast friend to him throughout.
The fifth section (2023), narrated by Dr. Iris Fenby, is where some readers may throw up their hands and say, “Not for me!” Because, you see, at strategic points in the four earlier stories, Mitchell drops in short but intense episodes of the on-going war between two feuding groups of Atemporals, the Horologists and the Anchorites. Horologists seem to be primarily immortal souls who migrate from one body to another as death requires; Anchorites stay in the same body, which never ages, but requires repeated ingestion of a human soul every three months. It really doesn’t pay to dwell too deeply on the details of their disagreements or histories. Still, you can guess who Mitchell thinks the good guys are.
These Atemporals are blessed with all the super-powers anyone could want: telepathy, telekinesis, the ability to stop time (but not go back or forward), Jedi-like powers of persuasion, and anything else Mitchell can conjure when he needs to move the plot along.
In this section, Holly plays a key role in the final battle which resolves the conflict. It’s fun to follow, and relies in great measure on her love for her younger brother, who went missing a day after she went on her walk-about.
In the end, Holly achieves redemption and as happy an end as possible, given the post-apocalyptic world she’s now living in. Once again, her guardian angel Atemporal shows up to smooth the way.
Despite the sudden shifts in narrative perspective and writing style which Mitchell employs, Holly remains a driving force. When first met, she is not really very likable, being a rather stupid impulse driven teen. But she learns – a lot – as her life proceeds, and by the end, we are rooting for her 100%. Even the Deus ex Machinations become fun, especially as the world is crumbling around them. An erudite, well-written page turner, more for its characters then for the story.
Oh, that title? We who must live temporal lives, with a beginning, middle, and end, are ceaselessly keeping time within ourselves. We are Bone Clocks.