13. The Bone Clocks

By David Mitchell

Last year I tried selling some trade paperback fiction on PPG, ie. Neal Stephenson, Dawn Powell (I had two copies)... the good stuff. Surprisingly, there were no takers (did no one read during the pandemic?), so I ended up selling them to SW Welch when his store reopened.  Someone on PPG responded saying 'I’m not interested but I’ll lend you my copy of The Bone Clocks, I think you’ll love it.'  I guess from the 5 or 6 books I was trying to sell, she deduced that I’d like The Bone Clocks?  I thanked her but did not take her up on her offer.  Yet I did put The Bone Clocks on my list, knowing that David Mitchell can be a damn fine writer when he wants to be.

When I was in Abbotsford visiting my brother in September, we went downtown for lunch and walked around the area.  We stopped by a pretty good used bookstore, which was where I found this copy of The Bone Clocks.

Overall, I really enjoyed the novel.  But it didn’t need to be 600+ pages, even for a writer like David bloody Mitchell!  I will say that I’d rather read 666 pages of Mitchell than slog through 99 pages of TJ Klune any day!

The Bone Clocks was rather misleading as a contemporary fantasy.  The fantastical elements comprised perhaps about 18% of the novel, at best?  It began conventionally enough:  girl runs away, girl meets boy, girl gets entangled with supernatural forces, girl gets memory wiped, girl grants asylum to immortal being to reside in the back of her mind for two decades.

Then the next chapter takes place about a decade later from the POV of a new character:  a university student named Hugo Lamb who harbors a double life. The fantasy elements take a back seat... of a very long touring bus.  Basically, the bulk of the book is from the POV of men who knew and loved Holly Sykes.  But the fantasy stuff, when they do come back, is really great.  David Mitchel can write and he can do fantasy, ie. believable world-building, a good backstory about ancient beings known as Atemporals, who are basically split between two warring factions.

Having watched Doctor Sleep on Netflix recently, the “psychoteric” war between the Horologists and the Anchorites shared amazing similarities with the psychic battles portrayed in the Stephen King adaptation, so much so that I had to look it up.   Doctor Sleep was published in 2013 and The Bone Clocks in 2014, so they were very close together and apparently, it was really by chance!

According to the Horologists, the Anchorites are “carnivores” because they murder and feed off children who are gifted with psychic voltage.  They then ‘decant’ their souls and drink from the Black Wine and this halts the aging process, as long as they perform this sacrifice every three months.  Unlike the self-serving Anchorites, the Horologists are "good" Atemporals since they allow themselves to age; when their bodies die, their souls enter the body of a child who had just died of natural causes.  Unlike the Anchorites, who get to keep their bodies, their immortality is based on reincarnation.  The Horologists have made it their mission to fight the Anchorites because what they do is simply wrong, if not downright evil.  Regular humans are known as Bone Clocks because they can't perceive this eternal battle that's been waging around their limited perceptions of space and time.  Mitchell did a good job fleshing out the individual Horologists, though the Anchorites were portrayed pretty two-dimensionally. 

In Doctor Sleep, an evil gang of supernatural beings retain their longevity by feeding on the psychic abilities (aka "steam") of children.  Instead of the Horologists, you have middle-aged Danny and his young charge fighting the bad guys.  I found the psychic premise and warfare in the Doctor Sleep movie quite thrilling so would like to read the book one day.  Same for the final “psychoteric” war in The Bone Clocks… when it finally occurred!  The best and worst thing about The Bone Clocks was that it’s the work of David Mitchell.  It’s not that Mitchell can't write a tightly structured, conventional genre novel.  He just won't -- he'd consider it beneath him. So he makes what should be a tightly structured, conventional work of genre fiction into a dense, literary novel.  Rather arrogant, if you ask me!

Back to the amoral, womanizing posh boy, Hugo Lamb.  He eventually gets recruited by the Anchorites, but before this happens, Mitchell goes on and on about his life in great detail. When Hugo meets Holly, many pages are devoted to Hugo wooing Holly, so you'd think that their brief fling would have some significance later.  Then Holly's high school crush, Dave Brubeck, comes back in first-person - now a 30-something war journalist married to Holly and saddled with an adorable toddler daughter.  Dave is torn between two loves and two duties: his family and profession.

Next comes Crispin Hershey, the most superfluous character in the entire novel.  Again, Mitchell devotes countless pages to Crispin’s life as a former Wild Child of literary fiction.  There's even an unnecessary subplot where Crispin’s revenge on a harsh critic ends up sending said critic to a South American prison for 3 years.  The critic was none other than Richard Cheeseman, an old university friend of Hugo Lamb.

You’re led to think that Crispin will have a bigger part to play in the fantasy subplot, but nothing comes of it.  An editor for any other writer would’ve excised this, but because it's David Mitchell, he got to keep all these irrevelant details because he had written so much of himself into Crispin Hershey - a male writer having a midlife crisis, whose star is fading, but his wit is still as sharp as ever, etc.  Most of all, Mitchell could make fun of himself in a self-referential way, like via this very meta scathing review of Hershey's latest novel:

So why is Echo Must Die such a decomposing hog?  One: Hershey is so bent on avoiding cliché that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistleblower. Two: The fantasy subplot clashes so violently with the book’s State of the World pretensions, I cannot bear to look. Three: What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?

Check, check and check for The Bone Clocks! Even though it could've easily been 200 pages shorter and a better book, would it have been a David Mitchell book?  I did get a tiny thrill when I read that Crispin’s ex-wife and daughters had a “little pied-a-terre in Montreal’s well-heeled Outremont neighborhood”, which I don't live far from. Those details can be fun.

What was disappointing was that nothing ever came out of Hugo’s fling with Holly.  His only connection was that he was recruited by the same Anchorite who had stalked Holly as a child.  Nor did Hugo’s past love for Holly alter the course of the final psychic battle in any way.  He merely followed Marinus out of the Chapel of Dust, managed to escape the collapsing wreckage, became an ordinary human again, and… was never heard from again!   Crispin was even worse.  He simply got killed off by a seemingly random person, Soleil Moore.  The only purpose that his character served was that he was another man who loved Holly in her middle age, and who witnessed Holly having a vision.  At least Dave Brubeck had a daughter with Holly. 

In the reader’s guide at the end, Hugo and Crispin, and to some extent, Dave Brubeck, were men who became better people because of Holly.  But what did this have to do with the novel's overarching narrative or theme?  

The final narrator, the Horologist named Marinus, was what brought everything back full circle. His chapter was the best one, not only because it explained everything, but was also the most creatively interesting because Marinus was convincing in his first life as a man and then as a young peasant girl who makes her way up in 16th c. society.  Marinus appearing in the final chapter when Holly was a grandmother in post-apocalyptic Ireland was pretty cool because he was able to finally return the favour by rescuing Holly's granddaughter and adopted grandson.

In the Guardian article, Mitchell spoke about ‘delayed gratification’ and not doing what other writers were doing.  The one thing I did appreciate with the ‘delayed gratification’ was that when the fantasy stuff came back in full force, it picked up the plot where it left off, made me revisit Holly’s section again, and then her encounter with Esther Little and Marinus made more sense.

The reader may have clean forgot what happened in the early chapters because several hundred pages have passed.  So all the weird stuff that happened to Holly when she was a teen, it all gets explained at the end. Holly, as a child, was plagued by visions and voices.  Immaculée Constantin stalked Holly as the next decanting victim for her immortal cult.  The doctor who treated Holly was Dr. Marinus who neutralized her psychic voltage to protect her from the cult.   Immaculée then kidnapped and murdered Holly’s little brother, who had actually died from hepatitis a year earlier and whose body was inhabited by a powerful Horologist.

This review “gets” The Bone Clocks and sums up what Mitchell was trying to achieve.

I mostly agree with this assessment, but still felt The Bone Clocks could’ve been a truly great fantasy book had it been structurally tighter.  As a literary work, the portrayal of three very different men having been affected by one woman makes an enjoyable enough novel, but certainly not a great one either.  The combination of the fantastical with the 'normal human stuff' makes it unusual and interesting, but that's about it. It was only Mitchell’s talents and humour that made the sloggy filler bits bearable, much like how I felt about Cloud Atlas. 

So glad I was able to finish before flying off the CA to join my fam for the holiday.