By David Mitchell
Rating: 4/5
Three-Word Summary: Mystics defying age
A few years ago, I was intrigued enough by a movie trailer to read David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. And despite it’s complexity of both form and prose, I thoroughly enjoyed the book.
Written more recently, The Bone Clocks has a very similar complexity to Cloud Atlas. Both have six distinct, yet interwoven story lines that span different time periods.
However, The Bone Clock’s segments comprise a relatively shorter time period — about 60 years as compared to almost 500 years in Cloud Atlas. This allows for The Bone Clocks to retain many of the same characters from one tale to another, especially heroine Holly Sykes, who appears in all six.
The character continuity is aided by the fact that several of the key personas either do not age or are resurrected with death. These themes of aging and time are the echoing motifs of the entire novel. Similar strains of resurrection are heard in Cloud Atlas.
The first few stories introducing Sykes, antagonist Hugo Lamb and novelist Crispin Hershey are grounded in reality with only glimpses of the magic to come.
However, the plot morphs supernaturally once the concept of the war between the cyclical Atemporals and the parasitic Anchorites is introduced. Just like Sykes, the reader is fascinated and baffled by this hidden and eternal struggle for the soul of humanity.
The more the narrative dips into the occult, the more farfetched it becomes. However, Mitchell is still able to retain enough reality to keep the novel understandable and entertaining.
Just as with Cloud Atlas, his strength lies in the ability to tell such different stories, in a variety of locations, in such unique voices, and still manage to tell one holistic story. And he is able to balance complexity of plot with simplicity of language.
Despite some scattered perplexing moments, The Bone Clocks is another stellar installment in David Mitchell’s growing body of work that firmly establishes him as one of the finer current post-modern authors.