The Bone Clocks

The wait is over. David Mitchell is back! Please don't let me spoil it for you, however — I try to be as vague as I can in all that I do but sometimes it's just not enough. Consider this a friendly warning from your friendly neighborhood Anchorite.

Let's start with where I stand. I've read Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and while I respect the two earlier works, it is the last mentioned that ticked all the right boxes for me.

My expectations were, naturally, very high. And, now that I've listened to and read the whole thing, I can attest that for me it's a mixed bag. Closer to Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas than The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, on one hand it's an exuberant and hyperactive narrative ride, a flamboyant explosion of modern cultural reference, a tapestry of metaphysical mystery and larger-than-life climax; on the other, I feel it never achieves the level of the strong gravitational pull The Thousand Autumns has in terms of characterization and actual, pulsating human drama — all this despite the book being actually two books, a story of Holly Sykes' life told from different angles, the extraordinary in the ordinary, and a fantasy novel with a metaphysical war raging behind the scenes, the ordinary in the extraordinary.

What the book turns out to be is an incalculable tease for the first 400 pages, where the fantasy plot, which does take precedence in ”An Horologist's Labyrinth,” is merely referred to and glimpsed at once in every fifty pages or so, just enough to make me remember it's there in the periphery, and wondering why it is. I assume Mitchell's goals might be elsewhere this time, but I found The Thousand Autumns to be perfectly woven, deeply identifiable story, an intimate portrait, also full of mystery, whereas The Bone Clocks and its apparent siblings are harder to care for, rather inviting from me detached admiration.

Where I found the first four parts hard to get into, but it's the aforementioned fifth part that's such a high-intensity display of literary fireworks that it was addictive, finally shifting gear and pushing for the exposition only vaguely hinted at so far.

I wrote of The Thousand Autumns how ”it's a joy to see a contemporary writer most certainly not only improving but showcasing such understanding of narrative and language that his work becomes transcendental in how it transports and rewards.” While it will always take time for first impressions to fully sink in, it feels like I'm going to reserve for The Bone Clocks detached admiration: not that it isn't complex, not that there aren't remarkably beautifully written passages (The Ásbyrgi episodes are bliss, as well as the Koskov backstory), but I just felt like an outsider gazing in, most of the time. Perhaps you'll be able to enjoy it more.

24 October,
2014