I've just finished the book I started last autumn. I knew David Mitchell (no not that David Mitchell) would be complex and at times challenging when I went into this book, not to mention the sheer size of it, but I hadn't anticipated it might take up a casual five months of my life. Meanwhile the To Read list was piling up and up...
Perhaps better known for the novel Cloud Atlas, which I haven't read, David Mitchell is an English novelist who I wasn't so familiar with. If you've read any of my previous posts you'll know I'm not the most clued up on modern literature, so this was a welcome change for me, and his references to other contemporary writers - such as in the character of Crispin Hershey - provided comic entertainment that I was just pleased to understand - for the most part.
Did I enjoy this book? The answer is probably as complex and labyrinthine as the book itself. Perhaps an appropriate adjective for a book that is indeed in some ways revolved around labyrinths. The labyrinth of time, of the brain, of the body, and of human connections and relationships.
It's no secret that we as a culture love connecting stories. You only have to look at the popularity of films like Love Actually or that brilliant classic, Valentine's Day (...) to understand how much people enjoy a tale of interweaving relationships, people meeting and parting, relationships beginning and ending, all somehow linked together in what becomes a quagmire of connections.
The Bone Clocks begins with Holly Sykes, a hormonal Gravesend teenager in the height of her rebellion against anything and everything. I didn't love the Holly voice, I found it stereotypical and slightly *cringe*. Unaware that the narrating voice was to change multiple times throughout the novel, this got us off on the wrong foot and owed to the lengthy reading time. It's only having read the entire book that I can look back with understanding and admiration at this first section I initially scathed, packed with innuendos and clues about what is to come in this hugely multifaceted story. So I guess my advice is: persevere.
We go through Holly, Ed, Hugo, Marinus to name a few, and one of the beauties of this book is certainly the sheer time and distance it spans. From Kent in the 1980s to Australia in the 2020s, and deepest darkest Ireland in the 2050s, Mitchell shows off his incredible knack of painting a detailed and familiar picture of any time zone and landscape, transporting the reader across hundreds of years and thousands of miles in a matter of pages.
You may be thinking: what on earth is this book about? The truth is, it's hard to say. Starting off as a tale of a teenager running away from home, this book slowly and subtly turns into a fantasy thriller before transmuting into an apocalyptic tale of what we may see happen to the planet in our own future. Of course, the fantasy element was the plot that strung the whole thing together - in short, the war between souls with the ability to ingress into dying people's bodies, those who do it to bodies already dying and those who are bodysnatchers and murderers - but really I felt this plot was a tool for exploring the strength of human relationships and, ultimately, love.
I'm not a fantasy gal normally, but I will try anything (except coriander. Never coriander). I did find the fantasy element overly complex, though. Having read about the book since finishing I've seen that Mitchell is a fan of re-using his characters and elements of his old books in new ones, so I think there's something to be said for the fun in spotting those clues. I felt that Mitchell had created a world so immense and layered that he needed the page span of Lord of The Rings to explain it properly, but maybe if I had read his previous works I would have felt more in tune with this aspect of his writing and seen a development in the world he created.
There are two things I bang on about in almost every book review I write, and this book executed them both brilliantly. Firstly, the ability to write in an accessible and simple (not simplistic) way without sacrificing any literary value - probably why the book was called 'one of the best novels of 2014' by Stephen King. Second, the spanning of one person's entire life through one story. Ultimately, this book was for me about Holly's life on a small scale, and the state of our society and planet in the large scale, rather than your standard off the shelf fantasy thriller.
Read it now! Get it here
