By Bron Sibree for the Sunday Times
The Bone Clocks
David Mitchell (Sceptre)
****
English novelist David Mitchell has been called a magician, a conjurer, a virtuoso of the fictional realm – and the finest, most audacious and ambitious novelist of his generation. The Bone Clocks is arguably the most hungrily-anticipated book of the year. It was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize even before its release – and some critics are likening it to his 2004 Booker short-listed novel, Cloud Atlas. “It’s even more Cloud Atlas-y than Cloud Atlas in a way,” concedes Mitchell, who also describes it as the novel of his midlife-crisis. “I wont run for office, I don’t want a sports car and I don’t have the stamina for an inappropriate mistress. It’s this book instead. This is where I’ve played it out in a way.”
Indeed, the notion of mortality is not just an accidental minor theme in what he demurringly calls “a sort of multi-tasking book,” but one he sheets home with unnerving power. Yet it begins, this 600-page novel, conventionally enough, in the youthful, slangy, voice of rebellious teenager, Holly Sykes, who runs away from her Gravesend home in the British summer of 1984. By the time you take leave of Holly as an old woman living in the oil-depleted world of 2043, you’ll have witnessed a battle between two bands of immortals in a chapel in the Swiss Alps and the end of civilisation as we know it. You’ll also have gleaned some tantalising titbits about Icelandic lore and the seven-millennia-old Whadjuk Noongar culture of Western Australia. Mitchell’s preternatural ability to teleport his readers across time, geography, cultures and genres is just one of a battalion of reasons why his fiction commands such a devoted following. Another is: he never repeats himself. Yes, you’ll find familiar characters, structures and references to his previous novels cleverly seamed into the fabric of The Bone Clocks, like a separate puzzle within an already vast, ornate Chinese puzzle. For as Mitchell has often declared, his novels themselves merely constitute chapters in a larger novel. “It’s become quite conscious now, that while my novels are in no way prequels or sequels they are nonetheless chapters in an uber book that’s larger than all of them.” His fans call this – along with his penchant for revisiting themes of reincarnation, trans-migration, privilege, power and predation – ‘interconnectedness’. Mitchell himself dubs it ‘intra-connectedness’ and in some senses The Bone Clocks is his most ‘intra-connected’ novel yet, with characters like Marinus, the wise physician from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and the caddish teenager from Black Swan Green, Hugo Lamb, reappearing in pivotal roles.
He’ll happily own up to his enduring fascination with the nature of evil and with predation but says the question he most wanted to answer in the writing of The Bone Clocks was, “what might the world look like in the 2040? I think about it a lot. What we as a species are doing to this planet obliges any sane person to think about it a lot, especially if you have kids. We will be leaving a far more impoverished ecosystem than the one we inherited. And if the climate science underpinning the novel is in any degree correct, I think in the 2040s what we’re doing now will seem rather quaint and irrelevant.”
He also finds the very idea of having the large readership he now commands “somewhat unnerving. I never get over the fact that people are willing to part with their hard-earned money and give me 10 or 20 hours of their finite number of hours to read the books. That’s an honour.” For Mitchell, who already has a new three-book deal and ideas enough to take him well into his 60s, writing is nothing less than an obsession, as well as a deep pleasure. “It’s like an itch that I can’t scratch.”
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Book details
- The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
EAN: 9780340921616
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