Already a hardback bestseller, longlisted for the Booker, one thing The Bone Clocks does is cement Mitchell’s post-Cloud Atlas reputation as the English novelist today who most prominently combines critical kudos with commercial chops. It’s not hard to see why: he’s a deeply readable and entertaining storyteller who is both hospitable to ‘genre’ and willing to play not-too-alienating-to-the-general-reader formal games in his writing. The critical kickbacks (for of course there have been some big klout-swinging reactions) have mostly taken the line that Mitchell’s dalliance with ‘fantasy’ demeans his literary ambitions—it being axiomatic to a certain kind of critic that genre stuff is both silly in itself and brings a contaminating silliness to anything it touches. Read Robert Collins’s unguardedly pompous and hostile Spectator review for an example of what I mean.
Of course my own feelings about the place of genre in the contemporary novel lie along a 180° orientation away from Collins’s. And I enjoyed The Bone Clocks very much. It is a big and rather loose-limbed novel, roping multiple stories together with cords more like battleship chains than Austenian fine threads. The narrative hops from the Thatcherite 80s through the present-day into a climate-change ruined near future; there’s a Frith-canvasful of characters, starting with the genuinely likeable teenager Holly Sykes who runs away from home in 1984 to move in with her 24-year-old car salesman boyfriend. Her voice is, I thought, well handled (so much so that I entirely forgive her for incorrect use of the subjunctive in the novel’s very first sentence!), and it sets the tone for the rest. By that I mean: Mitchell embroiders a carefully trompe-l’oeil texture of actual lived experience in order to frame artfully concealed references to the real meat of the novel—in this case, that Holly hears voices, her ‘radio people’. They are not, whatever Holly thinks, symptoms of her ‘nutso’ tendencies. Other narrative braids do similar things by way of balancing closely observed actual life against intimations of something beyond. Those intimations come into the open in the books’ fifth section, revealing a coherent and, despite a slightly hokey, over-familiar vibe, effective fantasy through-line. Two species of ‘immortals’ are fighting a sort of cosmic war. On the one hand are the ‘Horologists’, disembodied entities who it seems are incapable of dying—though they may wish to do so—and are repeatedly incarnated in mortal human existences. The Horology is composed of, basically, ‘goodies’. But there are also baddies: the ‘Anchorites’, beings who commit ‘soul-murder’ (‘animacide’) to elongate their own existences.
The Bone Clocks certainly provides its reader with variety. Some of these elements worked better than others, I thought; but this is precisely the old variety theatre rationale: if you don’t like whichever act is on stage at the moment don’t worry; another will be along in a bit. So, for example: I thought the ‘Crispin Hershey’ section tiresome: an extended sort-of satire, or riff, or splurge, on the contemporary (or, strictly, near-future) literary world. Hersey is a transparent puppetus sockus for Martin Amis (a writer ‘so bent on avoiding cliché that each sentence is as tortured as an American whistleblower’) who vents a series of vehement jealousies and hatreds; and his voice wasn’t really funny, or deft, or relevant, or even bilious-sparky enough to earn its keep, I thought. Perhaps it is a narrowness in my sense of humour that means I fail to smile at spleen of the ‘who on God’s festering earth does that six-foot wide corduroy-clad pubic-bearded rectal probe think he is?’ sort. Then again, I liked the sinisterly sociopathic Hugo Lamb, a Patricia Highsmith-y villain working his way through Cambridge. I think it helped that I grew up in East Kent (where young Holly goes on the lam) and studied at Cambridge last century, and that I recognised both worlds as Mitchell writes them. There’s also a storyline about a journalist (Holly’s fiancé in 2004), wedding-ceremony bored and thinking back to the horrors of the Iraq warzone he has covered, which is a little over-padded.
In a characteristically thoughtful review over at the New Atlantic, Alan Jacobs wonders whether the novel isn’t about the grounds and force of human love; and whether an existence un-limited by death would be capable of love in the deepest sense that is available to humans. But Jacobs makes a telling negative point too: the novel is too long (“I don’t wish that the book were shorter; but I do very much wish that it had been equally long in a somewhat different way. There is occasional tedium here for the reader, or for this reader anyway — a shocking thing to experience in a David Mitchell book.”) I thought that too. Indeed, I found myself comparing it to Stephen King’s recently published sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep (2013), a novel close enough to Bone Clocks that I wondered if Mitchell was writing a kind of homage. (I’m surprised, actually, that reviews don’t seem to mention the parallel).
King’s tale is also about soul-murdering immortals interpenetrating the contemporary human world. And King likewise writes long novels. It’s just that King handles length in a very different way to Mitchell. One area where King is nonpareil is the generation of narrative tension—he draws a story out by way of ratcheting the screws inside the reader’s head. Since the unsaid-but-anticipated acts in vastly more potent ways upon the imagination than the explained-and-revealed, this means his writing is capable of generating immensely potent and uncanny atmospheres. The slow burn, and slow reveal, can also invest even the silliest narrative premises (and written down in summary form Doctor Sleep’s torturing-children-to-death-so-as-spiritually-to-devour-the-‘steam’-they-release ‘True Knot’ surely sound pretty silly) with the illusion of that weight, that affective profundity, without which terror cannot be trout-tickled out of the cold pond depths of the reader’s soul.
This is where Bone Clocks falls down for me. I’m perfectly amenable to High Fantasy hokum about supernatural beings fighting for the very fate of the world in Swiss mountain fastnesses. But although the first five sections of the novel might look like they’re doing the King-y slow burn, gradual reveal thing, they’re actually not. They’re just too busy. Mitchell doesn’t trust his reader not to get bored, or doesn’t trust himself not to bore his reader, so he keeps piling in, loading his rifts with as much ore as they can manage and thereby fatally swamping the creation of the mood needful for the supernatural reveal properly to work. As a read, Bone Clocks is generally diverting and entertaining; but I, for one, missed the sensation of accumulating dread that would have boosted the cosmic battle out of the realm of hokum into something more powerful. Textual restlessness can achieve a number of things, but here it is pulling unhelpfully against the larger momentum of the book.
Review wrote by Adam Roberts (Sibilant Fricative)
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The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell
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