The best part about The
Bone Clocks – besides being able to live in Mitchell’s excellent prose – is
that the structure is a variation of what he usually does. His past work are
usually epic sagas spanning decades (Clock
Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob
de Zoet) from intersecting points of views that culminate into a general
theme; but Bone Clocks focuses on the
life of a single person, Holly Sykes, and this is shown through either herself or
from people in her life.
The first and final chapters are narrated from Holly’s point
of view, while all the years in between are filled in by family, lovers, etc.
In that sense, we get to see her go from being a teenager to being an old
biddy. We get to compare how she has grown as a person, how she has changed,
what she still retains from her old teenage self. This is especially
interesting to me because I am someone who subscribes to the belief that we
don’t really fundamentally change, but we do grow into a truer – or more
corrupted, depending on our lives – version of our selves.
Beginning on a summer day in 1984, Holly is an obstinate
teenager who ran away from home to be with an older boyfriend that her mother
disapproves of. Cut to her catching her boyfriend in bed with her best friend,
cut to her biting back tears, cut to her deciding to actually run away to punish
her peers and her parents. During this sojourn of teenage rebellion, Holly
encounters an old woman who requests “asylum” in exchange for some tea. Not
knowing what it means, she agreed. Roughly 24 hours later, she learns that her
little brother, Jacko, had disappeared without a trace.
Seven years later, we switch abruptly to the point of view
of Hugo Lamb (who Mitchell followers will recognize as the asshole cousin of Jason
Taylor in Black Swan Green). It’s now
1991, and he is part of the snobbish Oxbridge crowd. The small-scale swindling
that he engaged in in Black Swan Green has
escalated to full-blown grand larceny, such as hocking valuable objects from
dementia-ridden professors and orchestrating a gambling-fueled downfall of a
wealthy classmate. Lamb appears to lack a conscience, and he refers to most
people who speak of love or sentiment as “Normals.” But during a holiday trip
to the Alps, he meets Holly, and she sparks something close to human emotion in
him.
And on, and on, and on. Mitchell manages to capture each
individual’s life with a sense of ordinariness, punctuated by flashes of the
supernatural. For against the backdrop of Holly’s life and the people who
surround her, there is a war being waged between two groups over the
consequences of immortality. Holly has a role to play in this great saga, but
it’s not clear until near the end why she is important.
As is always the case with Mitchell’s work, there’s a lot to
love about The Bone Clocks. He again
dabbles with the themes of fate and pre-destination, but I think more prevalent
throughout it is the idea of human selfishness, which really comes into form in
the final chapter. The year is 2043, and the world has run out of petrol and
electricity, hailing in a period called The Endarkenment. I don’t want to give
away too much, but this chapter was actually such an unexpected gut punch for me – I had no clue that this was where the book was gonna end up,
though he did give plenty of hints throughout – and I found myself reading it
closely for what’s to come. It’s an entirely all-too-believable forecast for
our future.
Mitchell has said in an interview that the Bone Clocks was his “mid-life
crisis novel.” It shows, in a way. He is writing about immortality, about a
contract with the devil for eternal youth, about the excessive use of fuel and
humanity’s disregard for future generations – “all so we didn’t have to change
our cosy lifestyles.”
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